Speaking of non sequiturs, Donald Trump is awake and as expected, he picked up on Monday right where he left off on Sunday, ranting about Comey and “deep state” conspiracies.
You might recall that he capped off his weekend rant by branding Comey “Slippery James” who, according to Trump, is “a man who always ends up badly and out of whack.”
Without missing a beat, the President started the work week with this:
Comey drafted the Crooked Hillary exoneration long before he talked to her (lied in Congress to Senator G), then based his decisions on her poll numbers. Disgruntled, he, McCabe, and the others, committed many crimes!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 16, 2018
“Many crimes, many crimes” – like “many sides, many sides.”
Somehow – and here comes the non sequitur – Trump went from that, to the Russian ruble and the Chinese yuan in the space of six minutes. Behold! Covfefe:
Russia and China are playing the Currency Devaluation game as the U.S. keeps raising interest rates. Not acceptable!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 16, 2018
As usual, it’s not clear why the words “currency” and “devaluation” are capitalized, but there are a number of silly things about that tweet, not the least of which is that on Friday, the Treasury again decided not to label China a currency manipulator, despite Trump’s campaign trail rhetoric. Besides that, the yuan has appreciated against the dollar for five consecutive quarters.
Additionally, China has repeatedly hiked OMO rates in response to Fed hikes in order to avoid capital flight and a compression of the yield premium on 10Y bonds. Obviously, accusing Beijing of playing nefarious “games” on Twitter just a week after Xi tried to calm trade tensions with his speech at the Boao Forum isn’t a great idea.
As far as the ruble goes, if Trump is concerned about “devaluation”, he might consider what impact his own sanctions are having on the currency because as it turns out, that was the proximate cause of last week’s ruble collapse (who knew?).
If you want to talk about “playing the devaluation game”, maybe check on the greenback:
And if you’re wondering how the market feels about that, here’s the latest read on positioning:
[Goldman]
In any event, this is dumber than a bag of hammers for a laundry list of reasons, but you can bet your ass we haven’t heard the last of it.
Look at the charts above. US dollar has been crashing for 16 months. Thus, either the US is in economic collapse or the US is the world’s most-offensive currency manipulator. Mnuchin said the latter at Davos, “Devaluing our dollar helps US exports”. Draghi lashed out at US hypocrites at his next presser.
Thus, Trump is either a bald liar or a total brain dead moron. Or both.