And a happy Feast of Sunreturn to you too: Brendan Greeley: There's No Process Left at the White House: "Literally on the night before Christmas, after determining that a thing that is not a problem is not a problem, the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States of America is convening the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, an organisation that doesn't really exist. It doesn't have an office, or legal authority, or even employees. There's an executive order from 1988 that says the president can tell several department and agency heads to get together and talk... Whatever the working group used to periodically do, it's been replaced since the financial crisis by the formal work of the Financial Stability Oversight Council. Mr Mnuchin could just as easily call on the order of the garter to take up arms and defend the realm. He's throwing glitter on a football. This isn't how any of this is done...
...Alphaville has no idea why the White House is doing any of this, but we suspect and in fact fear that there isn't even a sinister reason. We fear that there's no process left in the White House at all, no one to tell the president how anything works, or how he might even carry out bad decisions. On economic policy as with national security policy, there may now just be a guy, sitting alone in a room, thinking things up and telling other people to go and do them....
#shouldread #oranghairedbaboons
