Your long national nightmare has just begun

[Savonarola]

Well, the good news is that Elizabeth Warren got her wish.  No more Mary Jo White at the head of the SEC:

Mary Jo White leaving SEC before Trump takes office

Mary Jo White announced plans on Monday to step down as chair of the powerful Securities and Exchange Commission before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
White's term at the helm of the SEC hadn't been scheduled to expire until June 2019.

Trump has promised to roll back the sweeping regulation of Wall Street that White has spent nearly four years trying to install. In fact, implementing Dodd-Frank rules and other financial reforms had been one of the biggest challenges during White's tenure at the SEC.

White, 68, did not state a reason for her resignation, but said it was a "tremendous honor" to lead the SEC and she is "very proud" of the agency's rule making as well as its enforcement actions.
In her statement, White said it's "critical" that the SEC remain "truly independent," allowing the agency to carry out its duty to safeguard markets and protect investors.

White praised her agency's efforts to reform money market funds and make companies become more transparent. She also noted that the SEC has notched three straight years of record enforcement actions, including insider trading and corruption violations.
But the SEC chair has also drawn criticism from the likes of Senator Elizabeth Warren. Just last month Warren, a Democrat, called for President Obama to remove White from her job because she wasn't doing enough to prevent businesses from pouring cash into politics.

It's not clear who Trump would nominate to replace White, but her departure could allow the president-elect to tap someone more in line with his deregulatory tilt.
White's exit would also mean that Wall Street's top cop will become even more shorthanded, with just two of the SEC's five commissioner seats filled. Gridlock in Washington has prevented the Senate from confirming Obama's two nominees.

White arrived at the SEC in April 2013 after being nominated by Obama, and despite leaving before her term is up she will be one of the SEC's longest serving chairs.
White served as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for nearly a decade until 2002. Her office successfully prosecuted the terrorists behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

She has also worked as a high-powered lawyer at the New York law firm Debevoise & Plimpton.

[11B4V]

I might stay off the internet for four years.

I'm wondering if this election isn't the very catalyst we need to begin unplugging.

Now what fun would that be.

[CountDeMoney]

Well, the good news is that Elizabeth Warren got her wish.  No more Mary Jo White at the head of the SEC:

It's not clear who Trump would nominate to replace White, but her departure could allow the president-elect to tap someone more in line with his deregulatory tilt.
White's exit would also mean that Wall Street's top cop will become even more shorthanded, with just two of the SEC's five commissioner seats filled. Gridlock in Washington has prevented the Senate from confirming Obama's two nominees.

So, how about that federal hiring freeze?  Wacky, huh?

[11B4V]

The man has no idea what he is doing.

Still, Mr. Trump's transition is slightly behind the pace set by previous incoming presidents and the timetable established by his own team.

President Barack Obama, for example, named his chief of staff two days after winning the 2008 campaign. Inside the Trump transition team, a broader group of officials known as the "landing team" was supposed to have been announced on Friday and start inspecting agencies for potential changes this coming week. That was delayed after Mr. Trump shuffled the transition team's leadership.

Another contributing factor: Mr. Trump's victory surprised even his own top advisers, who, before Tuesday, were unable to focus the New York businessman on the 73 days between the election and inauguration, a senior aide said. They said Mr. Trump didn't want to jinx himself by planning the transition before he had actually won.

During their private White House meeting on Thursday, Mr. Obama walked his successor through the duties of running the country, and Mr. Trump seemed surprised by the scope, said people familiar with the meeting. Trump aides were described by those people as unaware that the entire presidential staff working in the West Wing had to be replaced at the end of Mr. Obama's term.

After meeting with Mr. Trump, the only person to be elected president without having held a government or military position, Mr. Obama realized the Republican needs more guidance. He plans to spend more time with his successor than presidents typically do, people familiar with the matter said.

'Knife fight' as Trump builds an unconventional national security cabinet

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/14/politics/trump-shortlist-national-security-worldview/index.html

[CountDeMoney]

'Knife fight' as Trump builds an unconventional national security cabinet

Said it before, I'll say it again: everything you need to know about The Donald's decision-making process you can find on The Apprentice.

That being said, I think his administration will break the record for most West Wing resignations in a single term.

[viper37]

Well, the good news is that Elizabeth Warren got her wish.  No more Mary Jo White at the head of the SEC:

I'm a little confused by that statement:
called for President Obama to remove White from her job because she wasn't doing enough to prevent businesses from pouring cash into politics.
Didn't the Supreme Court judged this to be totally legitimate, as in, exercising free speech?  If so, what was White supposed to do?

[Admiral Yi]

I'm a little confused by that statement:
called for President Obama to remove White from her job because she wasn't doing enough to prevent businesses from pouring cash into politics.
Didn't the Supreme Court judged this to be totally legitimate, as in, exercising free speech?  If so, what was White supposed to do?

Maybe Pokey wanted White to bankrupt every publicly traded company.  It wouldn't be easy, but a dedicated SEC head should at least make the effort.

[jimmy olsen]

Bonds tumble.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/donald-trump-bond-market-impact-1.3850307

Trump dump: Bond prices lose $1T as investors fear higher debt and inflation

More than $1 trillion has fled bond market as investor worry about interest rates under Trump presidency

By Pete Evans, CBC News  Posted: Nov 14, 2016 4:09 PM ET|

To borrow a phrase from the president-elect, there's an apt word to describe the bond market's reaction to the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency.

Huge.

It's been barely a week since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, and while the U.S. stock market has so far reacted positively to the news, the much larger bond market has taken the opposite view.

On the campaign trail, the Republican nominee made waves with his talk of trade wars, higher tariffs and deficit spending. That's prompted fears of higher debt, higher inflation and higher interest rates — three things that are bad news for bond prices.

Unlike other asset classes, the price of the bond goes in the opposite direction to what's known as its yield — the amount, in percentage terms, that it will pay out.

■Loonie falls as investors expect Trump to spend big

If investors think America is about to borrow huge amounts of additional debt, they are demanding higher interest rates to loan the government money.

"Consider this," Bank of Montreal economist Benjamin Reitzes said Monday: "The price on 30-year Treasury bonds fell nearly five per cent on Wednesday, erasing two full years of coupon payments."

The 30-year has since lost another 10 basis points since Reitzes said that

And Canada isn't immune. The Canadian government's 10-year bond saw its yield surge by 27 basis points to 1.43 per cent, Reitzes noted. On the Friday before the election, that bond was priced at 103.10. On Monday, it had slumped to 99.60.

Between Friday and Monday, more than $1 trillion US of value has been wiped out of the world's bond market.

In the stodgy world of bonds, a fall that dramatic over such a short time period is astounding.

■Don Pittis: The bond crisis that most people have never heard of

"The bond market is supposed to be a dull, boring, stable place," said Colin Lundgren, head of U.S. fixed income at Columbia Threadneedle Investments. "Instead, it's been at the centre of the storm."

Trump says his deficit spending won't be a problem because he espouses the classic small-government view that tax cuts will be quickly be recouped — and then some — by how much they grow the economy.

Michael Lewitt, a bond fund manager who says he voted for Trump, isn't buying it.

■ANALYSIS: What were we thinking? Of course interest rates have to rise

"Cutting taxes and spending more money and not reforming entitlements, that's going to send debt through the roof," said Lewitt of the Credit Strategist Group. "The market is saying he is not going to worry about this, and that's going to be bad for bonds — really bad for bonds."

There are other signs that higher rates are coming soon. The U.S. central bank has been telegraphing for months that it planned to hike interest rates at least one more time this year. December was seen as the likeliest time to do so, and that's even more likely since Trump got elected.

According to data compiled by Bloomberg, economists who monitor the Federal Reserve now think there's a 92 per cent chance the central bank will hike its benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a point when it meets in early December.

That's another development that would send bond prices tumbling, and that's exactly what's happened to U.S. government debt in recent days. Investors have dumped 10-year U.S. government bonds, sending their yields soaring from 1.75 per cent to 2.15 per cent in just 36 hours. It typically takes many months for yields to move that much.

"The yield on the 10-year Treasury note bottomed out at just below 1.4 per cent this past June," Kroll bond rating agency said in a research note Monday, "but now appears to be headed towards yields almost twice that level as 2016 draws to a close."

"The Fed must raise benchmark rates in December merely in order to catch up with [these] bond market moves," Kroll said.

Tom Simons, money market economist at Jefferies and Co., says his take is that Trump's fiscal plan adds up to higher inflation, which will put pressure on bonds.

"I think we've topped out as far as the value of bonds," he said, "[and] a pretty high inflation environment in the future."

■Donald's dilemma: he says he's pro-business, but Wall Street doesn't seem to like him

Beyond his plans while in government, others note that the best reason to expect more bond-killing debt under a Trump administration is to look at his track record in the private sector. James Abate, chief investment officer of Centre Asset Management, says Trump made his fortune as a real estate developer by putting up buildings — and borrowing a lot of money to do it.

"Project what he's done his entire lifetime, and think of that on government level," said Abate. "He's going to issue debt, and that is what the bond market is spooked about."

[Syt]

You know what would be real laugh out loud funny, if Obama turns out to be Trump's most trusted and useful advisor during the next two months. 

I think we're due for a remake of the sitcom Benson, anyways

[Syt]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/the-american-media-is-completely-unprepared-to-cover-a-trump-presidency/507476/

The U.S. Media Is Completely Unprepared to Cover a Trump Presidency

Donald Trump and his surrogates have shown an uncanny ability to lie in the face of objective facts. They will now have the power of the federal government to help them.

Saddam Hussein was allied with al-Qaeda, and helped finance the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Hussein regime had sought uranium from Niger. Iraq had obtained aluminum tubes to be used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.

All of those assertions turned out to be false. But they echoed throughout the press in the months-long run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and only after the war turned to disaster did the media engage in soul-searching and self-criticism. And even then, many sought to deflect blame. Judith Miller, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter whose front-page story about the aluminum tubes bolstered the case for war in Iraq explained: "My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal."

During the 2016 presidential campaign, reporters marveled at the ability of Donald Trump and his surrogates to create an alternate reality in which statements made by the candidate had not been made at all—from his view that global warming is a hoax, to his nonexistent opposition to the Iraq War, to his refusal to say he would concede in the event of a loss, to his remarks about his relationship to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. These are people who could argue that the sky is green without a blink. They were able to win a presidential election while doing so. Now they will have the entire apparatus of the federal government to bolster their lies, and the mainstream press is woefully unprepared to cover them.

The first reason is that political journalism is highly dependent on official sources, which are chased with abandon. Miller's defense of stenography seems absurd in hindsight, but there is a grain of truth in it. Government sources are granted a high degree of credibility, and official lies can be difficult to dispute. Contrary leaks from highly placed sources can offer an important check on the official story, but the breadth of the surveillance state built by Bush and Obama, a surveillance state now in Trump's hands, will make such leaks difficult.

For Trump administration mouthpieces, both public and anonymous, lies will now come with an officiality that will be difficult to contest. The total Republican control of government means that Democrats will struggle to get their objections to carry much weight, much as they did prior to the Iraq War.

Another obstacle is that media objectivity is not a fixed point. It is carefully calibrated to the perception of public opinion, because media organizations do not want to alienate their intended audience. MSNBC's Chris Matthews offers a telling example of how media figures shift to identify with their perceived audience, which can ultimately mean cozying up to power. During George W. Bush's absurd war pageantry in May 2003, Matthews remarked that Bush looked like a "high-flying jet star," and that Bush "won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics." The Iraq War is arguably still ongoing.

The Matthews episode illustrates that in addition to reporting itself being manipulated, members of the media themselves engaged in careful brand-management exercises in order to portray themselves as in touch with "Real America," granting themselves permission to dismiss criticisms of the Bush administration as the ravings of pampered liberal elites. Only days after the 2016 presidential election, this process is already taking place, with prominent media figures seeking to defend the victorious Trump coalition against the slights of those religious and ethnic minorities who fear for their fate under a president who campaigned using them as scapegoats for the nation's problems.

Adversarial coverage of the Bush administration notably increased once his approval ratings dipped so low that media figures felt as though they were reflecting public opinion when they criticized him. The Bush administration's ability to shape the narrative in the aftermath of public crises like Hurricane Katrina was noticeably diminished, because unlike with Iraq, reporters could contrast official statements with what they saw with their own lives. Trump's ability to forge an alternate universe of belief for himself and his supporters suggests that reality may prove far less of an obstacle for him than it was for Bush.

Nevertheless, the ability of the Bush administration to use its power to compel the press to adopt its alternate reality led to the greatest foreign-policy blunder since Vietnam, and the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, as well as the rise of ISIS. The consequences are, arguably, immeasurable, and the stats I have mentioned simply cannot do them justice.

With Trump, the United States has elected a president who has shown a complete disregard for free speech, arguing that his detractors do not have a "right" to criticize him. He believes the First Amendment's protections for the press are too strong. He has a thirst for vengeance against those whom he perceives as having wronged him, and now he has the power of the federal government to pursue his vendettas. The Bush administration's ability to manipulate the press, and the media's willing acquiescence in the name of relating to its audience, led to catastrophe.

I want to emphasize that all administrations lie. The Lyndon Johnson administration successfully snowed the press on Vietnam. The Obama administration continually underestimated the strength of ISIS. With Trump, however, we are entering an era in which a president, prior to taking office, has already shown an ability to be entirely unbound by facts, with no political consequences.

The temptation to accept the Trump administration's unreality—particularly given increased distrust of the media and his ability to insulate his base from the truth—will be tremendous. His ability to use the powers of the federal government to bolster his dishonesty will magnify his powers of deception a thousandfold. And the inability of the Democratic opposition to affect the outcome given their marginal presence in the U.S. government will ensure that any dissent is muffled.

The media is not ready to cover this president. And unless something changes, the American people, and possibly the rest of the world, will pay for it.

[Admiral Yi]

That article would have benefited from a modest reduction in hyperbole.

[jimmy olsen]

That article would have benefited from a modest reduction in hyperbole.

What statements in particular do you disagree with or think are exaggerated?

[Admiral Yi]

What statements in particular do you disagree with or think are exaggerated?

Too much work.

[Savonarola]

Well, the good news is that Elizabeth Warren got her wish.  No more Mary Jo White at the head of the SEC:

I'm a little confused by that statement:
called for President Obama to remove White from her job because she wasn't doing enough to prevent businesses from pouring cash into politics.
Didn't the Supreme Court judged this to be totally legitimate, as in, exercising free speech?  If so, what was White supposed to do?

Donald Trump never let facts get in his way.  Why should Senator Warren?

[Savonarola]

The U.S. Media Is Completely Unprepared to Cover a Trump Presidency

Over-reliance on official sources is a long standing problem (going back at least to the New Deal; but probably much older than that.)  A bigger (and more recent) problem is that the media dedicates almost no resources to investigative journalism; something that will almost certainly be needed in a Trump Presidency.  The good news is that the (mainstream) media already hates Trump; so maybe they can find the money to do some muck-raking.  Also, if the Donald goes through staff as quickly as he did on his campaign the media should have no shortage of disgruntled "Highly placed" sources.

It might not make a difference.  Even in these days of demonstrations and transition the media can be every bit as trivial as ever.  Check out this story from CNN:  George W. Bush adopts a puppy

Perry White:  Clark!  Jimmy!  How does CNN keep scooping us?