Albert Edwards: “Agree With Trump Or Not, He Seems Determined To Enact What He Promised”
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Feb 2, 2017
The latest strategist to step into the pro/anti-Trump fray, is one of the original permabears, SocGen’s Albert Edwards, who in a Thursday note sided with Dan Loeb, and wrote that while the Donald Administration “might be a neo-liberal nightmare” if one strips away some of his more controversial rhetoric on immigration, “a lot of what he says on the economic front makes perfect sense to me.”
Edwards is also happy that unlike his predecessors, while crass and unpolished, Donald Trump continues to arouse “as much passion in office as he did on the campaign trail” and while one can “agree with him or not, unlike most politicians he seems determined to actually enact the things he promised the electorate.” That said, Edwards points out something we warned back in November, namely that while until the last couple of weeks “the markets had embraced only the ?good? bits of his campaign rhetoric”, only now are they reappraising, among other things, the likelihood of a trade war, with the Administration turning on Germany.”
The best example of this was Ray Dalio’s take in a recent Daily Observation note, in which the formerly enthusiastic hedge fund manager, warned that “we are now in a period of time when how this balance tilts will be more important to the economy, markets, and our well-beings than normally dominant drivers such as central bank policies,” Dalio wrote. The duo added that the current investment environment is marked by “exceptional uncertainty” and recommended avoiding concentrated bets, and holding easy-to-sell assets.
Edwards goes on to agree with Trump that “we have long written on these pages that Germany is one of the biggest currency manipulators in the world. Germany aggressively refutes any criticism, let alone does anything about it (unlike China).” The SocGen strategist also predicts that continued intransigence “will have huge implications for both financial markets and the sustainability of the eurozone” and notes that “Trump’s attack on excess regulation on US corporates also rings true. US corporate competitiveness is poor and deteriorating. The World Bank, for example, ranks the US a derisory 51st on how easy it is to start a business!”
This brings up a point we addressed one week ago, when using JPM calculations, we showed the staggering cost of regulatory compliance for US businesses, which amounted to $20,000 per employee on average, and a whopping $30,000 for workers employed across America’s small business, traditionally the biggest sources of new jobs across the US.
The Rest…HERE
