Donald Trump has become the new Jerome Powell. Though US President Trump has spent much of his tenure blaming Jerome Powell for being incompetent and complaining to Powell every time the US stock market has pulled back significantly during Powell’s tenure, Donald Trump, at a minimum, has learned from the chairman of the US Central Bank how to manipulate US stock markets by simply uttering complete falsehoods from time to time. In this article, I explained how the US stock market, since the start of September, has directly followed Donald Trump’s tweets about the status of resolution between the US and China over their trade war.
Donald Trump has learned, through the market’s reaction to his tweets, that he doesn’t have to be truthful in his tweets, but that he can used the media puppets to his advantage to move US stock markets in the direction he desires. That is why I state that Donald Trump has become the new Jerome Powell. If you look at the timeline of Donald Trump’s tweets about the China trade war, he is clearly not being honest, as he tweeted that no trade deal will happen until 2020 a few months ago, followed by tweets that he was on the verge of consummating a trade deal, followed by tweets that there would be no deal for at least another year, and then followed by his latest tweet of “getting VERY CLOSE to a VERY BIG DEAL with China”.
Trump has also learned that he can use caps in his tweets, much in the same style as would a 12-year old girl, to emphasize parts of his tweet that simply are not true, to influence markets even in greater fashion. In fact, it is remarkable to consider, that if Twitter did not exist, the US stock market would likely be in much worse shape than it is at this current time, as President Trump would not have a mechanism to immediately juice US stock markets higher available at his fingertips. Without Twitter enabling the spread of clear disinformation, President Trump would need to call press conferences to spread his propaganda about the US China trade war, during which his disinformation would come under much closer scrutiny and questions from attending journalists. Through the use of Twitter, Trump can avoid any scrutiny of his bogus claims, and influence markets due to the death of journalism, that never calls out bankers or politicians for the mountains of propaganda they spread. Through the enabling of Twitter, Donald Trump has become the new Jerome Powell.
Historically, every time the Chairman of the US Central Bank opened his mouth, markets would move on the basis of the slightest revelations of future Central Bank policy decisions, even if they never came to fruition in later months, and were largely exposed as propaganda. Take a look at the below charts of how gold and silver prices immediately reacted to Trump’s tweet about the US-China trade war during market hours yesterday.
Because I have proven that Donald Trump is the equivalent of the boy that cried wolf, eventually even the boy that cried wolf told the truth about a wolf being present. So, could this be the time that Donald Trump is finally telling the truth about the negotiations for a trade deal with China? No. The reason I’m so confident that there is no trade deal on the table at the current time that is close to being consummated is that only two weeks ago, the only potential deal that was available was a deal called a Phase 1 deal, meaning that a trade deal would consist of multiple phases so at best, only a partial deal was possible within a few week’s time. The Phase 1 deal was reported to address agricultural markets, currency markets and intellectual property rights. Furthermore, the Phase 1 talks did not even address the bigger divides between the two nations in their trade disputes. For example, the Phase 1 talks about intellectual property rights did not even address the more contentious issues of technology transfer issues involving data flows, cybersecurity, and product standards reviews.
Therefore, even if a Phase 1 deal is consummated, as promised by President Trump in the next few days, the more difficult topics of an overall trade deal between China and the US would remain largely unaddressed, and any announcement of a “VERY BIG DEAL”, as Trump described it, would be completely duplicitous, as a very watered down deal is the only deal that is possible in the imminent future. Thus, a comparable situation would be one in which a “GREAT VICTORY for anti-pollution advocates” was announced in the media, as US corporations were required to cut all of their pollution emissions by 40%, but the timeline to enforce the new regulations did not start until 2050. The announced victory would really be a complete lie, as nothing significant would be set to change until 2050, that is, if the new legislation even survived until 2050 and was not revised and weakened between 2020 and 2050. Likewise, any BIG DEAL announced by the Trump administration, if it happens, will be completely duplicitous in all probability, with no real significant progress made between China and US over any significant point of contention, and with only watered down benchmarks agreed upon.
Secondly, from a political standpoint, the relations between China and the US are likely the worst they have been within the past 10 years. Top Chinese government officials have expressed their strong belief that the US has funded the efforts in Hong Kong to destabilize China through fomenting discord in Hong Kong, and at a minimum they understands that the US funded neo-Nazi Azov battalion Ukranians members recently joining ongoing protests in Hong Kong earlier this month is highly unlikely to have occurred without considerable outside foreign interference. Certainly, the waving of British flags and support for a symbol of brutal colonial oppression in Hong Kong for hundreds of years demonstrates the misguided and misinformed state of many Hong Kong protestors. A similar act of misguided defiance would be observing Indians or Zimbabweans (Rhodesians) waving British flags in an act of desired greater freedoms in their respective nations. The press would never give such misguided citizens of India and Zimbabwe, if they waved symbols of their colonial oppression in a “freedom” movement, a free pass for such ignorance.
Furthermore, the Chinese government has reacted with outrage to US Congressional meddling in the Xinjiang affairs by stating, “It is regrettable that U.S. Congress has not only turned a blind eye to Xinjiang’s efforts to combat terrorism and protect human rights in accordance with laws and regulations, but also to Xinjiang’s current economic development, social stability, national unity and religious harmony.” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying elaborated further, “The US bill smears our efforts in counterterrorism and deradicalization, which only reveals America’s double standards on counterterrorism and further exposes to the Chinese people its hypocrisy and malicious intention.” Thus, without discussing what is really happening in Xinjiang, much of which has been massively distorted in media reports in a similar fashion to the reporting of the chaos in Hong Kong, the point of republishing the above statements from Chinese government officials is simply as an exposition of the true state of political affairs between the US and China.
Without discussing who is right and who is wrong in the above matter (and it is of my opinion, after conducting research into that situation, that both China and the US have released their own propaganda about the above matter), at a minimum, these statements illustrate the existence of poor political relations between China and the US at the present time. In fact, though many Chinese retaliations remain unreported in the Western press, China has suspended US military vessel visitation rights to the port of Hong Kong in response to that US intelligence agencies have been fomenting discord in matters that they consider to be sovereign State affairs.
In conclusion, from a purely common sense perspective, it is highly unlikely that a severe degradation of political relations between two nations that has created a political situation of extreme distrust between two nations could serve as the foundation for a “VERY BIG DEAL” over a highly political negotiation like a trade agreement. Consequently, if US President Trump announces a “very big deal” in the next few weeks, don’t expect details of the trade agreement to be reported that would expose it is a complete farce of an actual, substantive trade deal.
