In our preview this morning, we noted that it seemed odd that Trump's tax speech had reportedly been drafted by White House aide Stephen Miller, the leader of the nationalist arm of the White House staff, as opposed to his Chief Economic Advisor Gary Cohn.
While notable because it indicated that Trump might return to his populist roots in his first tax reform cheerleading session, most didn't ascribe any more value to the information than that.
While Donald Trump is not exactly known for his oratorial and diplomatic skills, either during live speeches or within the confines of his trademark outbursts in 140 characters or less on Twitter, he is positively Machiavellian compared to Japan's 76-year-old deputy prime minister and finance minister in Abe's cabinet, Taro Aso, whose entire career appears to be a series of diplomatic blunders and verbal gaffes.
Taro Aso, Japan Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance
Despite Silicon Valley's hopes, Mark Zuckerberg remains an outside long-shot bet to get the Democratic Presidential nomination for the 2020 election. The front-runners are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, with Joe "soul of the nation" Biden in 4th place...
According to a new contract at PredictIt, Bernie and Liz are number one...
However, Cupertinoans should not despair, Zuckerberg's odds of running for president is holding steady.
We wonder who The DNC will choose this time.
Update: Following Trump's Springfield, MO speech, Treasury Secratary Steve Mnuchin issued the following statement which, much like the Presidnet's speech, calls for more jobs, higher wages, higher GDP growth, sugar, spice and everything nice....yet provides absolutely no details on how to accomplish any of it.
With just one month left until the Treasury "X-date", or the moment when it would run out of cash without a debt-ceiling resolution...
... the time has come for dire, apocalyptic threats to spook Congress into action and specifically reaching a compromise on a debt ceiling resolution, and S&P - which infamously downgraded the US in 2011 during the last debt ceiling fiasco - is happy to be the source of bad news.