We are going to see an absolute orgy of self-enrichment over the next four years. It will be unparalleled, even eclipsing 2008, when Hank Paulson et al opened the Treasury to his BFFs at what used to be called investment banks, which destroyed themselves and the global trading markets, and at what are still known as commercial banks. They were able to empty the UST coffers to ensure the wealth of the senior management was not destroyed, thanks to Hank stampeding the herd warning of a global financial Apocalypse.



This will not end well. The rise of Trump was obvious following the global financial crisis, after the U.S. executive branch failed to enforce the law and prosecute the massive fraud that occurred in the former investment banks and existing commercial banks. (See https://www2.fbi.gov/congress/congress04/swecker100704.htm and http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/09/17/mortgage.fraud/ ). Mortgage fraud did not disappear between 2004 and 2008, as the crisis showed. But the Obama administration strongly signaled there would be NO prosecution of any corporate criminal activity, which is pretty much how the Obama years played out. They gave all the bad actors the combination to the safe then looked the other way. Voters reacted at the ballot box this time.



This time around, when the economy heads south as these oligarchs are wallowing in their unfettered access to the government's coffers -- and writing the rules and regs to benefit themselves -- the self-enrichment at a time of economic contraction will become unbearable to the folks that elected Trump. Their household incomes will fall and their daily cost of living will rise, putting them even further behind the level that made them Trump supporters in the first place. Civil unrest will bubble over. At that point, the press, which continues to fawn over the oligarchs running the American plutocracy, will whip the electorate into a frenzy that ends with a demand that Trump assume more of a strongman role. Constitutional rights likely will be suspended. We are not immune. Just like the Rome around the time of Cicero when it heads south it plummets.