When Donald Trump was running for president, he routinely bragged about being the “King of Debt.” “I’m great with debt,” he told Norah O’Donnell in a June 2016 interview. “Nobody knows debt better than me. I’ve made a fortune by using debt, and if things don’t work out I renegotiate the debt. I mean, that’s a smart thing, not a stupid thing.” Armed with this vast professional experience, Trump declared that as president he’d be better than anyone at fixing America’s debt and deficit problems, even insisting, incredibly, that over a period of eight years he would make America debt-free, a feat not accomplished since 1835. Of course, as everyone but the president seems to understand, screwing over your creditors isn’t something you can do as a head of state, nor is the United States government some seedy Atlantic City casino you can refinance—a fact that economists have been at pains to drive home since the president embarked on his massive spending spree.
“My view is that this fiscal expansion is probably the most foolhardy escapade in modern economic policy history,” Albert Edwards, a global strategist at Société Générale wrote in a report to clients on Wednesday. Noting that the timing of Trump’s giant fiscal stimulus was “utterly ridiculous” considering the strength of the economy, Edwards warned that Trump’s yuge tax cuts, plus a $300 billion spending package, plus a proposed $200 billion infrastructure plan “will only accelerate the collapse of U.S. financial markets as the Federal Reserve hikes rates even more quickly. . . . The post-mortem will identify President Trump’s ludicrously timed fiscal stimulus as a key trigger for the collapse.”
The ludicrous timing is the crux of the problem. As my colleague William D. Cohan notes, there’s only so much gasoline you can pour on a white-hot economy before it overheats. Last week’s market correction was primarily the result of fears that the Federal Reserve will respond to rising inflation by hiking interest rates and slamming the brakes on the whole shebang, kicking off a potential Twitter war between Trump and new Fed chair Jerome Powell in the process. That’s a dangerous position to be in when you’re already in a nearly decade-long expansion cycle. When the economy inevitably slows (which, memo to the president, is how business cycles tend to work), the debt problem gets even worse.
Even the ultra conservative Heritage Foundation is horrified by the pace at which Trump is spending money. “It fails as sound fiscal policy,” senior policy analyst Justin Bogie commented this week before reminding his audience that the guy who in their mind was Satan with a black card wouldn’t even be so rash. “This proposal would add an additional $7 trillion to the national debt,” he said, “something not even a big spender like President Obama ever proposed.” Panning the Trump University-level thinking at play, Pantheon Macroeconomics economist Ian Shepherdson added on Thursday that “This is the dumbest thing the U.S. could possibly do.”
