The Illusory Foundations Of Peak Trump, Part 1

The history books will record that Peak Trump happened on February 19, 2020. That’s when the S&P 500 hit 3385– a level 70% higher than the day Donald Trump was sworn to office. So in the State of the Union address a few days earlier the Donald had gone all-in embracing the most dangerous and unstable Everything Bubble in modern times:

Since my election, U.S. stock markets have soared 70 percent, adding more than $12 trillion to our nation’s wealth, transcending anything anyone believed was possible…All of those millions of people with 401(k)s and pensions are doing far better than they have ever done before with increases of 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100 percent, and even more.

But that’s all she wrote, and even that was largely an illusion. Within days the US economy would be monkey-hammered at the Donald’s own hand, when he unleashed Dr. Fauci and the Virus Patrol and sent the economy of main street America into a thundering tailspin.

As we have previously demonstrated, these sweeping Trump-ordered Lockdowns sent his MAGA record into last place in the economic performance league tables of post-WWII presidencies and left the American economy in a condition so bruised, battered, inflated and debt-ridden that it still hasn’t recovered.

More importantly, the booming stock market Trump was celebrating in February 2020 was never real or sustainable and no tribute to Trump-O-Nomics in any way, shape or form. To the contrary, it was the final surge of a long-running bubble fueled by the real culprit behind the hollowed-out economy of Flyover America that had handed Trump a hairline Electoral College victory in 2016.

We are referring to the nation’s rogue central bank. In just the eight short years between the Lehman bankruptcy filing in September 2008 and Trump’s inauguration, it had pumped $3.5 trillion of newly minted dollars into Wall Street. That was nearly 400% more than the $920 billion the Fed had printed during the entire first 94 years of its existence!

Federal Reserve Balance Sheet, June 2008 to January 2017