Mnuchin Gets It
United States Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin has a sweet gig. He writes rubber checks to pay the nation’s bills. Yet, somehow, the rubber checks don’t bounce. Instead, like magic, they clear. How this all works, considering the nation’s technically insolvent, we don’t quite understand. But Mnuchin gets it. He knows exactly how full faith and credit works – and he knows plenty more.
Master of the Mint and economy wizard Steven Mnuchin and his wife at the annual ritual greenback burning festival. [PT]
In fact, Mnuchin’s wife, Louise Linton, says she admires him because “he understands the economy.” And Mnuchin, no doubt, admires Linton, a Scottish actress 18 years younger, because “she loves SoulCycle Snapchat filters that make people look like puppies and piglets.” Naturally, Mnuchin gets the importance of puppy and piglet filters and how this bizarre fad fits into the big picture of the economy.
Unlike Mnuchin, we find the economy, and its infinite and dynamic relationships, to be beyond comprehension. But that doesn’t deter us from attempting to make some sense of it each week. When it comes to Snapchat filters we know nothing – and we could care less. Still, who are we to question Snap Inc.’s $24 billion market capitalization?
What we do understand is simple arithmetic. So, too, we care a great deal about the increasingly precarious predicament the 115th U.S. Congress is putting the American people in. As far as we can tell, the approaching disaster is much closer than Mnuchin will publicly recognize.
US public debtberg-to-GDP ratio – cruising for a bruising. The growth in public debt in recent years is unprecedented in peace time (arguably, the term “peace time” is not an accurate description of the current era). Lettuce not forget, this is just the debt they actually admit to, so to speak.
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