Summary: President Trump’s campaign promises are falling by the wayside one by one. First the backfire on the replacement for Obamacare, and then, just as talk of tax reform heats up, the administration seems to be gazing toward the Democrats for a bi-partisan solution to tax reform. No good can come from bi-partisanship. When the Republicans and the Democrats are working together, that’s when you really have to watch your pocketbook. That’s when the most damage gets done. The stock market initially rallied on the jobs number, but sold off by the end of the day; normally, you get a print this low the dollar index would tank and gold would take off. That didn’t happen because the night before Donald Trump decided to Make America Great Again by bombing Syria.
- Well, I am back on dry land, I was away for a week doing a cruise with the Real Estate Guys Summit at Sea
- One of the presenters was senior vice-president and chief economist of Fannie Mae Doug Duncan
- I thought my presentation would be a big contrast to his, I thought he would present the usual government unrealistic estimates, but
- I was very pleasantly surprised, as I listened to his presentation, I found I agreed with him
- And after a private conversation with him after his presentation, we had a great discussion and we didn’t desagree on anything!
- He is very bearish on the housing market, very much against Fed policy
- He’s against the minimum wage
- We had a long conversation and we really disagreed on nothing!
- I was quite surprised to find a government insider who showed such economic insights
- So it’s just not Peter Schiff who sees these problems looming on the horizon
- In the bond market, in the real estate market
- The is a minority of government economists, just like I’m in the minority of Wall Street or investment economists
- But it’s good to know that there are some good people working within the government
- But I wanted to get into topics of this podcast; a lot to talk about
- Let’s start with the Non-Farm Payroll report
- The jobs report that came out on Friday is usually the most highly anticipated release of the month
- Everybody was enthusiastic about this report
- Earlier in the week we got the ADP number, the private sector number which is normally a precursor to the official government number
- and that number was way ahead of estimates, so there was a lot of enthusiasm that we would have a beat for the official government March number
- They were looking for 175,000 jobs which was going to be a reduction from the 235,000 jobs reported for the month of February
- The actual number of jobs that were created was not 175,000 but 98,000
- Big miss on the headline number
- In fact, they actually revised downward the previous month
- So they took that down from 235,000 to 219,000 and now we got 98,000 versus 175
- And the private payrolls were even worse; they were looking for 170,000 and we only got 89,000
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