Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Replies to Sam Part 2

I told you my buddy Sam sent me a lot of reading material over the weekend. Here is the second part of me catching up...

Business Insider: CREDIT SUISSE: Don't worry, China is no Lehman Brothers in the making



The headline of this story totally disagrees with what is being said:

Because of the interventionist inclinations of the Chinese policymakers, the end-game for the rapid buildup of leverage that has been underway in China since 2008 is more likely to be a Japan-style gradual (and multi-year) malaise in the domestic banking system than a “Lehman moment”
Great! Instead of one huge crash, China will experience a multi-year economic malaise, like Japan. You could call it an economic "Chinese water torture".

Business Insider: Congress is making an $18 billion gamble with the Pentagon's war fund


The story:

Congress has passed the sprawling legislation for 54 straight years, and while the bill’s enormous price tag matches the topline asked for by President Obama, this year’s draft makes a gamble on funding that not even the Defense Department is thrilled about. 
The legislation was approved around 2:30AM in a bipartisan 60-2 vote after a 16-hour marathon mark-up. It shifts $18 billion of the $58.8 billion the Pentagon requested for the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund – commonly known as the war account – into the department’s normal operating budget. The money would pay for things like 11 more F-35 Joint Strike Fighters ($1.5 billion) on top of the 63 requested by the military services and boost the Navy’s ship building account ($2 billion).

The problem, from Defense Secretary Ash Carter:

 “It is gambling with warfighting money at the time of war, proposing to cut off our troops' funding the places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria in the middle of the year,” he said. “It would spend money on things that are not DOD's highest unfunded priorities across the joint force,” he added. “It buys force structure without the money to sustain it and keep it ready, effectively creating hollow force structure, and working against our efforts to restore readiness.”
And a camel is just a horse designed by Congress...

The Week: Why Ted Cruz failed to carry the #NeverTrump banner

This article doesn't give a cut and dried reason for Cruz's failure, but I will throw you a few:

1. It's "Senator" Cruz. At the start of this race, there were only two Republican candidates who had never run for political office before: Donald Trump and Ben Carson. And the electorate was in too foul a mood to vote for a nice guy like Carson. All that left was politicians to try and challenge Trump, and politicians have one innate failure: They are political, to the bone. They give stupid political answers like "I was for it before I was against it". Even Cruz suffers from this. Even if he is viewed as some kind of rebel senator, he is still a senator.

2. Forget God. Sorry Lord, but the majority of the American public has had enough with religious presidents. It's not God's fault that religious politicians have been such epic failures. Starting with Jimmy Carter and ending with George W. Bush, presidents who wear religion on their sleeves have been disasters. The fact Cruz likes to espouse his evangelical beliefs does him no favors, except with conservative nanny-staters.

3. Remember the shutdown! Even if you can get past the first two items, who can forget Cruz's biggest boneheaded move, the government shutdown. While I supported the idea (nothing bad ever came from shutting down the government), even I have to admit Cruz screwed the pooch on this one. He had one plan: Shut down the government until Obama caves. But Obama didn't cave, the Republicans got scared, and then Cruz had no plan B. The Republicans caved and looked like idiots, while Cruz was the architect of this. The public won't vote for this "rebel without a clue".

Speaking of Cruz, here is one of my favorite Tweets from yesterday:

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