Trump and Republicans Carry the Day (and Water) for Wall Street

Just to be certain that the big government shutdown over the weekend was a big puff of smoke that left nothing other than a fog and stench, here is a comment made by a presumably knowledgeable person on how big business perceives the machinations and meanderings of the politicians in Washington, DC.

So far Wall Street is the dog that didn't bark in the night time. Indeed, all of Big Business is.

I work coordinating business meetings, mostly for Fortune 500 companies; the companies that spend enough on meetings to bother hiring professionals to handle them. I'm usually pretty busy during these meetings, but I keep an ear open for interesting tidbits when I can, and sometimes I have nothing to do but listen to every word.

Usually these companies do discuss politics, and how they plan to position themselves vis-a-vis the political climate. Not lately, they haven't been. Almost nary a peep. And that includes pharmaceutical companies, which usually are about as attuned politically as anyone.

The companies I work for, and you've heard of them, are ignoring:

- Attempts to change ACA (they know the entire healthcare finance system is already broken anyway, and they have to buy their employees health insurance no matter what happens so they don't care);

- Efforts to raise the US minimum wage to $15/hr. (they're already planning to raise pay because they can't hire people at the prevailing suppressed wages);

- The tax bill (they already pay corporate taxes at an effective rate so much lower than the headline rates it doesn't matter, and their top executives already mask most of their income from the tax system so effectively no legislation conceivable in the current political climate matters at all to them);

- Immigration (they simply don't care because they have no liability or consequences no matter what);

- Carbon-based fuels (they're all getting out of them anyway because they're too expensive and inefficient; if Trump wants to subsidize them while they're doing it they're fine with that);

- Government regulations (they pay their way out of them anyway, one way or the other, and write off the costs);

- Global trade agreements (all the methods they use to evade existing duties, tariffs and sanctions supersede such things anyway); etc.

- War and rumors of war (None of the wars involve or will involve anything they have an interest in. They have deep enough contacts to know there isn't going to be a nuclear war, and no other wars on the table pose more risk than profit opportunities to corporate interests);

- Ethics investigations, "RussiaGate," Uranium 1, PizzaGate, FISA-gate, or any of the popcorn nonsense dominating the partisan media (who invented ad campaigns in the first place?).

Indeed, most of the issues we concern ourselves with don't even interest the executives of the biggest corporations in America.

This is reflected in Wall Street. Where it matters, they know they've got the system dicked. It simply doesn't matter to them one way or the other, which faction of the Oligarchy has the upper hand today or tomorrow.

Here's the link to the comment (from a site on which the Money Daily staff has been banned twice for speaking truth to power).

Thus, stocks gained on the eve of the shutdown and also on the end of the shutdown. The shutdown was bad theater engineered by obstructionist Democrats who have nothing left in their quiver of attack arrows outside of assiduously assaulting the sitting president.

...and, apparently, it wasn't even close to being enough, as their gambit blew up in their collectivist faces, and especially so on the visage of one NY Senator Chuck Schumer, a sell-out to his constituents and to his party.

At the Close, Monday, January 22, 2018:
Dow: 26,214.60, +142.88 (+0.55%)
NASDAQ: 7,408.03, +71.65 (+0.98%)
S&P 500: 2,832.97, +22.67 (+0.81%)
NYSE Composite: 13,470.37, +85.91 (+0.64%)