Including the moratoriums



You’re probably already tired of hearing about it even a few days after the fact, but the story of the week was undoubtedly the midterm Blue Wave that upended the balance of power in Washington, and for more downstream reasons than consensus may fully appreciate. Most directly, a Congress dominated by outspoken adversaries of the White House potentially stands to throw many wrenches into the machinations of an administration trying to accomplish the high-wire act of simultaneous decoupling, reindustrialization, and preservation of dollar hegemony. Readers will have to draw their own conclusions on whether any of those are worthy goals (though even their supporters should probably be able to concede their execution has been uneven thus far), but it’s clearly going to be slightly more difficult to balance all of those priorities if everyone in President Trump’s circle down to the junior staffers is fighting off special counsels and impeachment proceedings for the next two years (change the channel, I think I’ve seen this one before). The caveat there is that the Treasury and Fed are still arguably more important to this agenda than any member of Congress and remain helmed by two figures who seem clearly aligned with the administration’s direction of travel – plus, as we flagged a few weeks back, some senior Democrats are now publicly echoing many distinctly Trumpian talking points on several key issues – but the next moves in an already complex game have no doubt gotten even more complicated.

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