Here’s Janet Yellen:

The Federal Reserve may need to run a “high-pressure economy” to reverse damage from the 2008-2009 crisis that depressed output, sidelined workers, and risks becoming a permanent scar, Fed Chair Janet Yellen said on Friday in a broad review of where the recovery may still fall short.

Though not addressing interest rates or immediate policy concerns directly, Yellen laid out the deepening concern at the Fed that U.S. economic potential is slipping and aggressive steps may be needed to rebuild it.

I see this as a big mistake. The Fed needs to focus on smoothing out the path of nominal spending.  There’s not much they can do about the economy’s “potential”, and trying to boost it would end up destabilizing the economy.  Back in the 1960s, the Fed also believed there was a permanent trade-off between inflation and unemployment—it did not end well.

Yellen’s comments, while posed as questions that need more research, still add an important voice to an intensifying debate within the Fed over whether economic growth is close enough to normal to need steady interest rate increases, or whether it remains subpar and scarred, a theory pressed by Harvard economist and former U.S. Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, among others.

Her remarks jarred the U.S. bond market on Friday afternoon, where they were interpreted as perhaps a willingness to allow inflation to run beyond the Fed’s 2.0 percent target. Prices on longer dated U.S. Treasuries, which are most sensitive to inflation expectations, fell sharply and their yields shot higher.

Yellen’s statement was not an indication of Fed policy, but merely the musings of one person.  It’s very unlikely to be put into action.  And yet bond prices plunged. Now imagine if all 12 members of the FOMC got on a stage and said they were raising the inflation target from 2% to 3%.  The impact on the bond market would have been at least 10 times greater than what occurred yesterday.  There’s no question that the Fed can move inflation expectations, the question is what should they be doing?  Credibility has never been the Fed’s problem.  In late 2008, the Fed’s contractionary policy was highly credible—markets saw where the Fed was pushing NGDP.  In 2009-10 their explicit decision not to return NGDP to the old trend line was highly credible.

Jeffrey Gundlach, chief executive of DoubleLine Capital, said he read Yellen as saying, “‘You don’t have to tighten policy just because inflation goes to over 2 percent.’

“Inflation can go to 3 percent, if the Fed thinks this is temporary,” said Gundlach, who agreed Yellen was striking a chord similar to Summer’s “secular stagnation” thesis. “Yellen is thinking independently and willing to act on what she thinks.”

It would be destabilizing to let inflation go to 3% while unemployment is low.  It would bring the recovery to a premature end, triggering another recession as soon as the economy was hit by another oil shock.  Instead, the Fed should shoot for 3% inflation during the next recession—not during this expansion.  But they currently lack a policy regime capable of achieving that (countercyclical) outcome.  Yellen’s policy remains resolutely procyclical.  NGDPLT anyone?

“If strong economic conditions can partially reverse supply-side damage after it has occurred, then policymakers may want to aim at being more accommodative during recoveries than would be called for under the traditional view that supply is largely independent of demand,” Yellen said. It would “make it even more important for policymakers to act quickly and aggressively in response to a recession, because doing so would help to reduce the depth and persistence of the downturn.”

That’s a really big “if”, which goes against 50 years of macroeconomic research.  That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, we learn new things all the time.  But this theory is not even close to being ready to implement.  At a minimum, we’d need many years of research and testing of the idea, before using the US economy as a test tube for Yellen’s latest theory.

PS.  Commenters invariably tell me that easier money leads to more investment, and hence more growth.  Do you really believe that macroeconomists haven’t been aware of that?  The problem is that it doesn’t boost the economy’s long-term growth rate, and hence creates more cyclical instability.  It might be helpful to consider “investment” as “home building”—one of its biggest components.  It’s true that even today the flow of housing services from homes is larger than it might have been without all those homes built during the 2003-06 boom.  Does the mean the 2003-06 housing boom boosted the long term growth rate of the US?  Did it help to stabilize the US economy?

PPS.  Don’t take this post as a criticism of Yellen’s current policy stance within the Fed.  I don’t have a problem with her recent votes (not to raise rates.)

PPPS.  I have a related post at Econlog, which discusses the issue of credibility and inflation expectations.

HT:  TravisV

When Trump started rising in the polls, Democrats like Paul Krugman told us that he didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.  After all, Trump wasn’t much different from other recent GOP candidates.  The voters also seemed to think he was no worse, and thus gave him the nomination.  (No I’m not blaming Krugman, because GOP voters don’t read him.  My point is that he was effectively aiding Trump, even though the impact of his assistance was almost nil.)

In a sense Krugman was right.  Romney was also demonized as a vile racist and sexist.  Jonah Goldberg reminds those of us who had forgotten:

So yes, the coverage of Trump is an outrage. But the outrage it exposes is how grotesquely unfair and partisan the press was to previous Republican nominees. The Trump campaign is getting the coverage it deserves (and is asking for!), and that highlights how the coverage of past candidates was so extraordinarily unfair. Take for example, the bowel-stewed hysteria over Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” comment. Romney said — and did — exactly what feminists and liberal reporters should applaud. He wanted to hire qualified women. So he reached out to women’s groups for suggestions. They sent him lots of recommendations. Binders full of them. And then he hired many of the women listed in the binders. What a monster!

Then Goldberg links to a left wing hit job, with this headline:

With his incendiary speech to the NAACP, Mitt crossed an ugly line. No longer simply spineless and disingenuous, he’s now become a race-mongering pyromaniac.

I admit I do not recall that “incendiary speech”, so I decided to refresh my memory by reading the article.  And here’s what I found:

But he wasn’t a race-baiter until yesterday. That speech wasn’t to the NAACP. It was to Rush Limbaugh. It was to Tea Party Nation. It was to Fox News. Oh, he said some nice things. And sure, let’s give him one point for going there at all. But listen: You don’t go into the NAACP and use the word “Obamacare”and think that you’re not going to hear some boos. It’s a heavily loaded word, and Romney and his people know very well that liberals and the president’s supporters consider it an insult.

I have to admit that I did not know that “Obamacare” was considered a racial slur, and still am not quite certain why.  But let’s say he’s right—what else does he have?

Nothing.  That was it.  That was the only offensive item mentioned.  Now look again at the headline of the news article.  I knew nothing about Michael Tomasky until I read this article.  Now I know one thing about him.

Nobody should pay much attention to what the Dems say about Trump.  They say exactly the same things about other GOP candidates, just a bit more forcefully in this case.  Instead you should read the intelligent conservative commenters, who usually defend GOP nominees.  Most of Goldberg’s post savages Trump, and we all know the politics of the author of “Liberal Fascism”.  I’d guess 90% of the intelligent conservative commentators have been ruthlessly trashing Trump for months.  (And don’t mention Sean Hannity, I said intelligent conservative commentators.)  Those are the people you should listen to.  Just as Democratic voters should ignore my anti-Bernie Sanders rants, and instead take note of the fact that even a progressive like Krugman found his ideas to be wacky.

Of course Mitt Romney is one of those intelligent conservatives that GOP voters should have listened to.  Now it’s probably too late to save the GOP from an embarrassing defeat.

Since 1990, the GOP has produced one President, and he brought us a useless war, increased government spending and regulation, and the Great Recession.  Now they’ve nominated someone far worse.  They really need to do some soul-searching.  I expect Hillary to be a poor president, so 2020 is a good opportunity to rebuild, if they can get their act together.  A good place to start is becoming more elitist.

PS.  The Goldberg post was emailed to me—I can’t find a link.

PPS.  Not one major newspaper endorsed Trump.  No surprise the NYT didn’t, but what to make of all the conservative papers?  A poll of 45 former CEA people found zero in support of Trump.  I know what you are thinking; “But West Virginia hillbillies who don’t know that Trump lies every time he opens his mouth like him because he ‘tells it like it is’.”  Well good for them—I’d rather listen to George Will.

PPPS.  I now think that the presidency has lower job qualifications than any other job in America.  Trump’s statement about grabbing women was so offensive that Billy Bush was fired from his job merely for giggling at Trump’s pathetic comments.  What other company would hire people who say things that are so offensive that mere listeners are permanently disgraced, unable to find work? What other fields hire people who openly express contempt for expertise in the job?  What other field hires people who openly lie about their qualifications right to the face of the interviewer, with such bold-faced lies that both sides know it?  What other field hires people who relentless insult a large portion of the customer base?  I’m afraid that the presidency is America’s lowest occupation—a job that will take people who are so unqualified to do anything else that they end up running their own company out of desperation. Trump may be a billionaire, but he’s not qualified to be hired as janitor in the Trump Tower.  If you owned Trump Enterprises, would you hire a janitor who grabbed the crotch of elegant women in the elevator?  He’s lucky his dad left him $40 million.

If Trump wins, he may well assume that he is still self-employed—Trumps don’t do “public servant”.

Trump is at it again:

A visibly agitated Donald Trump on Thursday delivered a rambling response to recent allegations of sexual harassment and assault made against him by several women. In a nearly hour-long speech, he attacked the credibility of the women making the accusations, and then veered off into descriptions of a massive global conspiracy against him and his presidential campaign.

At times, Trump’s angry rant carried more than a whiff of paranoia.

Fortunately, I was able to find video of Trump’s speech:

“The central base of world political power is right here in America, and it is our corrupt political establishment that is the greatest power behind the efforts at radical globalization and the disenfranchisement of working people,” he claimed. “Their financial resources are virtually unlimited. Their political resources are unlimited. Their media resources are unmatched. And most importantly the depths of their immorality is absolutely unlimited.”

That’s a pretty big conspiracy, and who’s behind it?

Trump left no doubt as to who he believes is pulling the strings of this shadowy cabal: his Democratic challenger for the presidency and her husband, former president Bill Clinton.

“The Clinton machine is at the center of this power structure,” he said. “We’ve seen this firsthand in the WikiLeaks documents in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty.”

So this vast conspiracy with “unlimited resources” was not able to stop another shadowy global conspiracy from one Wikileaks revelation after another.  Nor was the all-powerful conspiracy able to stop a community organizer from Chicago from defeating it in the 2008 primaries.

“The Clintons are criminals, remember that, they’re criminals,” Trump said. “This is well documented and the establishment that protects them is engaged in a massive cover-up of widespread criminal activity at the State Department, at the Clinton Foundation in order to keep the Clintons in power…. Never in history have we seen such a cover-up as this.”

No never, as even Fox News can’t find it.  Even worse, dozens of GOP Senators and Congressman are joining the conspiracy, probably bribed by the Clinton Foundation.  Poor Donald doesn’t have the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to compete with these people.

Take deep breath, Donald:

As it went on, Trump’s speech became increasingly apocalyptic in tone.

“This election will determine whether we’re a free nation or whether we have only the illusion of democracy but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system — and our system is rigged,” he said. “This is reality, you know it, I know it, they know it and pretty much the whole world knows it. The establishment and their media enablers wield control over this nation through means that are very well known. Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe and morally deformed. They will attack you, they will slander you, they will seek to destroy your career and your family.”

Even worse, those who pull all the strings (the Clintons), never have to face a long string of women who claim they’ve been abused, because they control everything.

He added, “[T]heir agenda is to elect crooked Hillary Clinton at any cost, at any price, no matter how many lives they destroy. For them, it’s a war. And for them, nothing at all is out of bounds. This is a struggle for the survival of our nation, believe me, and this will be our last chance to save it.”

Wait, I thought the Civil War was the last chance.  We have another last chance?

“These vicious claims about me, of inappropriate conduct with women, are totally and absolutely false,” he said. “And the Clintons know it and they know it very well.

And how would the Clinton’s know that . . . unless they put these women up to it?

The Republican nominee also spent considerable time casting himself in the role of willing martyr for his supporters. Suggesting that negative news stories about him are all false, he said they were, nevertheless, “hurtful.”

So the guy who mocked all the other GOP candidates, and their wives and dads, is suddenly a softie, worried about “hurtful” feelings.  Maybe we can shut down the 1st amendment after Trump gets his new libel laws passed and make the White House a “safe space” for him and that piece of  . . . er, and his children.

“I never knew that it would be this vile, that it would be this bad, that it would be this vicious,” he said. “Nevertheless, I take all of these slings and arrows gladly for you. I take them for our movement so that we can have our country back.”

Now I feel a certain affinity for the Donald.  Like him, I accept thousands of slings and arrows from alt-rightists and Austrians in my comment section, in my lonely and brave fight for NGDP targeting. (I like that “slings and arrows” metaphor, is that from an old Dylan song?  “How does it feel to accept the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” or something like that.)

HT:  Scott Freelander, who is an important cog in this vast global conspiracy.

PS.  Recall Hillary and her vast right-wing conspiracy?  Here’s how politics work in a two-party system.  Two vast conspiracies form (with animal mascots), and they fight it out, in search of power.  Apparently Trump didn’t even know that fact before entering the race.  What a naif!

Here’s The Hill, discussing Trump’s campaign chairman:

Steve Bannon, the chairman of the right-wing news outlet Breitbart who became CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, gave explicit orders to his staff to destroy Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).

On editorial conference calls, the Breitbart chairman would often say “Paul Ryan is the enemy,” according to a source who worked with Bannon at the news organization.

You might think that is due to Ryan’s lukewarm support of Trump.  Not so:

In December 2015, weeks after Ryan became Speaker, Bannon wrote in an internal Breitbart email obtained by The Hill that the “long game” for his news site was for Ryan to be “gone” by the spring.

So why did Bannon hate Ryan in 2015?

A former Breitbart staffer said Bannon used to rage against Ryan all the time.

Bannon views Ryan as a leader of an elite globalist cabal determined to sell out America by opening its borders on immigration and trade.

“Bannon has Alex Jones-level paranoia about Paul Ryan,” the source said, referring to the right-wing radio host and conspiracy theorist who runs the pro-Trump website Infowars.

“He goes on these amazing rants,” the source added of Bannon. “He thinks Paul Ryan is part of a conspiracy with George Soros and Paul Singer, in which elitists want to bring one world government.”

People sometimes say that while Trump is totally insane and knows nothing about public policy, he’ll pick good advisers.  Yet his advisers are just as crazy:

On Monday, Breitbart published a story with the headline: “Falwell: Lewd Trump tape part of GOP coup against Donald, no ‘coincidence’ it came right before Paul Ryan joint appearance.”

Yes, a tape that may cost the GOP control of the House was somehow Ryan’s master plan.  And why didn’t Ryan release this tape before Trump got the nomination?  Perhaps Ryan secretly wants Hillary to win, so he didn’t want a more electable Republican to get the nomination:

“Trump is running against the evil empire,” the source continued. “The entire machine stands against him, and Paul Ryan is the face of the evil empire. But so is Hillary Clinton and so are her allies throughout the mainstream media.”

Some of Trump’s more intellectual supporters don’t like his position on many issues, but think he’s good on immigration.  They don’t care about “character”, which is why they voted for him over much better GOP primary candidates.  Here’s why a vindictive character matters:

“Breitbart has always been the tip of the spear in the conservative grassroots world,” a source close to Bannon told The Hill on Tuesday.

People who’ve worked with Bannon say it’s foolish to underestimate the lengths Bannon will go to destroy the GOP establishment.

“He’s an instrument of destruction,” said Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart staffer who fell out with Bannon.

“Bannon has always wanted to burn everything down,” he added, “and any chance he has to wriggle this into a way to destroy Paul Ryan, he’ll absolutely do it.”

With a normal GOP candidate there was zero chance of the GOP losing the House. It’s still unlikely, but much less so than before. Ironically Trump may end up being the best friend the open borders people ever had.  Just imagine Trump repudiated and “Hillary unchained”. Bryan Caplan’s dreams may come true.

A normal politician like Obama is willing to allow Senate candidates a bit of separation.  For instance, West Virginia’s Senator needed to do so because of Obama’s views on coal.  Obama understood this, and kept his eye on the most important goal—Democratic control of the Senate. He cut him some slack. Trump is like a 6-year old, with no self-control.  He’ll thrash out even if it hurts him.  Putin will play him like a fiddle.

Here’s the Economist on the Alt-Right:

The association precedes Mr Trump’s hiring as his campaign manager of Stephen Bannon, former boss of Breitbart News, a reactionary news website that Mr Bannon reportedly described as “the platform for the Alt-Right”, and which has covered the movement favourably. Already Mr Trump had echoed the Alt-Right’s views on Muslims, immigration, trade and, indeed, Vladimir Putin, whom Alt-Righters ludicrously admire for his supposed pursuit of Russia’s national interest. Pressed about these shared prejudices (and tweets), Mr Trump has denied knowing what the Alt-Right is, even that it exists—unable, as usual, to disavow any support, however cretinous, or to apply a moral filter to his alliances or tactics.

It’s time to drop the silly pretense that Trump is a Republican.  I don’t think he’s reliably Alt-Right either, their views just happen to coincide on a number of issues. But since the Alt-Right is playing such a key role in his campaign, it’s worth asking what they believe:

Much of the Alt-Right’s output will seem indecipherably weird to those unfamiliar with the darker penumbras of popular culture. It has its own iconography and vernacular, derived from message boards, video games and pornography. Its signature insult is “cuckservative”, directed at Republicans supposedly emasculated by liberalism and money. Its favourite avatar is Pepe the frog, a cartoon-strip creature co-opted into offensive scenarios; one Pepe image was reposted this week by Donald Trump junior and Roger Stone, a leading Trumpista, the latest example of the candidate’s supporters, and the man himself, circulating the Alt-Right’s memes and hoax statistics. Its contribution to typography is the triple parentheses, placed around names to identify them as Jewish.

Charming.  Until recently, the modern American right had a couple of good qualities.  They favored free markets, and they were less anti-Semitic than the European right.  Now they’ve become anti-trade and anti-Semitic.  I suppose this is no surprise.  We’ve been hearing about how Trump represents a rebellion against the soulless, urban, cosmopolitan elite.  Hmmm, what could those be code words for?

And it’s not like Trump’s precursors were anti-Semitic.  Oh wait . . . 

Here’s some more:

To most Americans, the purposes to which these gimmicks are put will seem as outlandish as the lexicon. One of the Alt-Right’s pastimes is to intimidate adversaries with photoshopped pictures of concentration camps; a popular Alt-Right podcast is called “The Daily Shoah”. To their defenders, such outrages are either justified by their shock value or valiantly transgressive pranks. Jokes about ovens, lampshades and gas chambers: what larks!

The leading media supporter of the Alt-Right is Trump’s campaign chairman. Instead of ignoring a minor provocation from Paul Ryan (who still endorses Trump!) the campaign has launched a crusade to destroy the entire sane wing of the GOP, right in the middle of the Presidential election.

Yet from the quack ideologues to the out-and-proud neo-Nazis, some Alt-Right tenets are clear and constant. It repudiates feminism with misogynistic gusto. It embraces isolationism and protectionism. Above all, it champions white nationalism, or a neo-segregationist “race realism”, giving apocalyptic warning of an impending “white genocide”. Which, of course, is really just old-fashioned white supremacism in skimpy camouflage.

Suddenly I get commenters who tell me that any “real man” with testosterone would want to simply grab any woman he chose.  For a while I wondered where this misogynistic stuff came from–now I know.

PS.  Just to be clear, I’m not saying the GOP will lose the House, just that the odds have risen.  By the same token, some Dems have told themselves that the election is in the bag.  It’s true that Clinton is very likely to win, but a 16% chance is . . . well Nate Silver put it best—it’s the odds of dying in Russian roulette.  Want to play a game?

PPS.  Let’s not hear any whining from Trumpistas if their guy loses.  Remember, Trump says fairness is for pussies. Who cares whether the personal attacks on him are fair.  Who cares if the press is biased? He said the other GOP candidates were too nice, and that he’d steamroller right over Hillary.  He assured us that he was a winner.  He told us that his controversial lifestyle would not matter.  So if he does lose, there are no excuses.  If you start whining, then you are not true Trumpistas. So go get a shot of testosterone, and toughen up.  Trump is a winner, or else he’s a nobody.

These debates about whether X did something worse than Trump are really tiresome.  Whether the outrage over the tape was justified is beside the point. There’s plenty more to be outraged over—advocating stealing Iraq’s oil, stealing Libya’s oil, torture, bigotry, refusal to condemn concentration camps for Japanese-Americans, ignorance of nukes, apologies for Putin, ambiguity over NATO, protectionism, inciting violence, tighter controls on freedom of the press, etc.  I could go on and on.  NOBODY cares what you (commenters) think about sex scandals.  Don’t waste your keystrokes.

PPPS.  People are confused about the markets.  The stock market probably wants Hillary to win narrowly, so that the GOP holds on to Congress.  A Trump win, or a Hillary landslide, would be a nightmare for Wall Street. So poll/market correlations need to be interpreted with caution.

PPPPS.  Don’t waste time reading my Trump posts.  Look at someone who knows how to write, like Ross Douthat:

Above all, they feared the specter of a defeated Donald Trump railing against a corrupt convention bargain all through 2016 and beyond. So instead they will get Donald Trump railing against an establishment dolchstoss, a stab in the back, from the moment the polls close on Nov. 8 until he either wins the 2020 nomination or draws his dying breath.

History in its day to day is not a morality play. But sometimes there is a clear chastisement, a moment when the judgments of providence seem stark. And so it may be for the men who led the Republican Party into its Trumpian inferno.

In bending the knee to Trump last spring, they thought that they were buying party unity and a continued share of power, and paying for it with just a little of their decency, a mite of their patriotism, a soupçon of their honor.

They may find out soon enough that all this bargain bought them was an even harsher reckoning, and that all they will inherit is the wind.

George Will has a slightly more hopeful view:

Today, however, Trump should stay atop the ticket, for four reasons. First, he will give the nation the pleasure of seeing him join the one cohort, of the many cohorts he disdains, that he most despises — “losers.” Second, by continuing to campaign in the spirit of St. Louis, he can remind the nation of the useful axiom that there is no such thing as rock bottom. Third, by persevering through November 8 he can simplify the GOP’s quadrennial exercise of writing its post-campaign autopsy, which this year can be published November 9 in one sentence: “Perhaps it is imprudent to nominate a venomous charlatan.” Fourth, Trump is the GOP’s chemotherapy, a nauseating but, if carried through to completion, perhaps a curative experience.

But in the end, it’s the funny stuff that keeps me sane:

Carson, for his part, gave a similar line on CNN: Waxing poetic about power-trip crotch grabbing is common “banter,” he said. It is distasteful, he argued, but certainly not rare. Anchor Brianna Keilar, looking slightly perplexed, informed (Ben) Carson that few normal people have heard “locker room talk” of this amped-up variety. “I haven’t heard it,” she said, “and I know a lot of people who have not heard it.”

“Well maybe that’s the problem. Maybe that’s the problem,” Carson replied, calm as a Xanax factory. “People have not heard this. Maybe that’s the problem.” Keilar stared in wonderment. Yes, folks, this was happening: Carson was blaming America for failing to frequent scarier locker rooms.

Remember when Carson briefly led in the GOP polls? If only I could move to Utah, where polls show massive support for NeverTrump/NeverHillary.  The latest poll I saw in that “swing state” had Trump and Hillary tied, at 26%.  Speaking of Utah, this is fascinating.

Since Bob Dylan is my all time favorite artist, in any medium, I should probably say something here.  (And what medium is he in?  I don’t believe for a moment this is a Nobel Prize in “literature”; this is a music prize—although perhaps the modern English professors say it’s one in the same.)

Tyler has his list of favorite albums, so here is mine:

1.  Live at Royal Albert Hall (1966)  (Actually Manchester)

2.  Blonde on Blonde

3.  Bringing It All Back Home (side two is the peak of his career)

4.  Highway 61 Revisited

5.  Freewheeling Bob Dylan

6.  Another Side of Bob Dylan

7.  Blood on the Tracks

8.  Street Legal  (most underrated)

9.  Time Out of Mind

10.  New Morning

I generally prefer the visual arts, and don’t have good taste in music.  For instance, I love the sound of Dylan’s voice, whereas Joan Baez singing his songs sounds like nails on a blackboard to me.  Most people seem to believe the opposite.  Go figure.

I’m not a fan of the Nobel Prize in Literature (or the Peace Prize, Academy Awards, etc.) but I guess they are an inevitable part of life. If someone had to win, I’m glad it was Dylan.  We are both from the upper Midwest.

Favorite unreleased songs — She’s Your Lover Now, Blind Willie McTell:

Seen the arrow on the doorpost

Saying, “This land is condemned

All the way from New Orleans

To Jerusalem.”

I traveled through East Texas

Where many martyrs fell

And I know no one can sing the blues

Like Blind Willie McTell

 

Well, I heard the hoot owl singing

As they were taking down the tents

The stars above the barren trees

Were his only audience

Them charcoal gypsy maidens

Can strut their feathers well

But nobody can sing the blues

Like Blind Willie McTell

 

See them big plantations burning

Hear the cracking of the whips

Smell that sweet magnolia blooming

(And) see the ghosts of slavery ships

I can hear them tribes a-moaning

(I can) hear the undertaker’s bell

(Yeah), nobody can sing the blues

Like Blind Willie McTell

.

There’s a woman by the river

With some fine young handsome man

He’s dressed up like a squire

Bootlegged whiskey in his hand

There’s a chain gang on the highway

I can hear them rebels yell

And I know no one can sing the blues

Like Blind Willie McTell

 

Well, God is in heaven

And we all want what’s his

But power and greed and corruptible seed

Seem to be all that there is

I’m gazing out the window

Of the St. James Hotel

And I know no one can sing the blues

Like Blind Willie McTell

PS.  I’d like to see a Venn diagram for the overlap between people who love Bringing it All Back Home and people who voted for Trump in the primaries.