Texas is a conservative Republican state, right on the firing line as millions of Mexican rapists and murderers pour across the border.  (Well they used to, before net immigration from Mexico virtually stopped after 2008.)  So you’d think that Texans would be especially enthusiastic about the new wall.  Not quite:

Few, if any, Texans in Congress support building a wall across the entire U.S./Mexico border, according to a Texas Tribune delegation-wide survey.

None of the 38-member Texas delegation offered full-throated support of a complete border wall, a position popular with President-elect Donald Trump’s supporters that would impact Texas more than it would any other state.

No worries, Mexico will pay. And maybe we misunderstood Trump:

“We will construct a great wall at the border,” Trump said at a rally earlier this month in Cincinnati. But the president-elect has also discussed only constructing a wall in areas where natural barriers like rivers do not exist.

The Rio Grande rivals only the Amazon in width, so perhaps that’s enough.  But I prefer the idea of a sort of analogy to a wall:

That would be at odds with many of Trump’s supporters, 79 percent of whom were in favor of building a wall across the entire U.S.-Mexico border, according to a Pew Research Center poll in August.

Some Texas Republicans in Congress told the Tribune they backed building a wall but declined to clarify whether it should be a contiguous construction from San Diego to Brownsville. U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Dallas, believes Trump’s support for a border wall is “an analogy,” according to a spokeswoman.

Perhaps Trump could erect a “wall of ignorance” along the Mexican border.

Among many Texas Republicans in Congress, the concept, while popular with the party’s base, collides with another conservative tenant: eminent domain.

A wall would require the confiscation of ranching land near the Rio Grande, and several Texas Republicans expressed concern about the federal government taking away property — often held by families for generations — and the legal tangles that would inevitably arise from that.

Suddenly I’m a big fan of gridlock.  NIMBY!

On another topic, even John Yoo, yes, that John Yoo, thinks Trump is going too far:

As an official in the Justice Department, I followed in Hamilton’s footsteps, advising that President George W. Bush could take vigorous, perhaps extreme, measures to protect the nation after the Sept. 11 attacks, including invading Afghanistan, opening the Guantánamo detention center and conducting military trials and enhanced interrogation of terrorist leaders. Likewise, I supported President Barack Obama when he drew on this source of constitutional power for drone attacks and foreign electronic surveillance.

But even I have grave concerns about Mr. Trump’s uses of presidential power.

One searches for “analogies” from the Nazi era; but no, I better not go there.

PS.  Congrats to Matt Ryan on a spectacular game:

Matt Ryan QB rating = 144.1

Tom Brady  QB Rating = 95.2

I.e. the regulatory structure that gave us the mid-2007 to mid-2008 banking crisis (the late 2008 crisis was also on the Fed.)

That’s what I infer from this letter sent to the Fed from an important GOP Congressman.

I have been a big critic of Dodd-Frank and wouldn’t mind seeing it repealed.  But only if other simpler and more effective regulatory changes are made.  Those might include higher bank capital requirements, getting rid of Fannie and Freddie, and/or reforming FDIC.  But as far as I can tell, the GOP is opposed to all of these actions.  Indeed the letter warns that higher capital requirements will slow economic growth.

So it looks to me like the GOP favors the regulatory system that led to the 1980s banking crisis and the 2007 banking crisis.  Am I wrong?  (I hope so.)

PS.  The letter is hard to quote from, as it’s a photo that’s difficult to copy.  But the gist of Congressman Patrick McHenry’s letter is, “Give banks liberty, or give me death.”

HT Lars Christensen

Update:  You heard it here first.  Trump will replace Mike Pence with Noam Chomsky in 2020—a better fit for his views:

When Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly challenged Mr Trump in the interview, saying “Putin’s a killer,” the president replied: “There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers . . . What, you think our country is so innocent?”  .  .  . ” I do respect him [Putin].”

How many times have top GOP figures had to totally disavow the embarrassing statements made by Trump over the past 12 months?

I expect Trump to fail to deliver on his promise to improve the economy.  We are likely to see the same sort of performance that we saw with Obama, if not worse.  And now we know how Trump will deal with that failure.  But first a bit of data from the recent employment report:

Payrolls up 227,000, vs an average of 201,200 during the past 6 years.

Unemployment up from 4.7% to 4.8%.  It had been trending downwards.

Wages up 0.1%, vs. a trend rate of 0.2% in recent.

One number is better than the trend, and two are worse.  But that’s not what matters.  What matters is that none of the three key numbers are statistically significantly different from the recent trend.  Not even close.  This is essentially a typical Obama jobs report.

When Obama was President, Trump described those Obama jobs reports in almost apocalyptic terms.  There is economic “carnage” in America, the economy is horrible.  But now that Trump is President he describes an almost identical jobs report as great, and tells us that it shows his policies were already working via the expectations channel, even before he took office:

The White House took a victory lap on the jobs report, but it doesn’t really belong to Trump

So Trump’s plan is simple, redefine failure as success.

PS.  This is also typical:

President Trump’s heated rush to launch what he said would be a “major investigation” into voter fraud has cooled, leaving White House staff uncertain when it will come to pass or what shape it will take.

I guess someone told him the investigation would not turn up anywhere near the 3 million extra voters he needs to win the popular vote.

There is a very simple explanation of why voter fraud is rare.  It involves three parts:

1.  Voting is an altruistic act; you are very unlikely to impact the result.

2.  Voting fraud is evil.

3.  Evil people are selfish.

That’s also why I don’t worry much about allowing ex-cons to vote.  If you were the kinda guy who robs liquor stores, why the heck would you want to waste time voting, or even registering?  And why would an illegal alien risk being deported simply to vote.  I’m not saying it never happens, but let’s be realistic here.

PPS.  I know little or nothing about the legality of Trump’s recent immigration moves.  But I predict that Trump’s red hot rhetoric in the campaign will hurt him in the courts.  Judges know about his promises to ban Muslims.  They know about his racists comments about the American judge with a Spanish surname. They are likely to be biased against him, on hair trigger alert for abuses of government power.

You can say that’s not “fair” to Trump.  Yes, but then nothing about Trump has ever been based on “fairness”.  He’s a winning is everything, at any cost, kind of guy.

I’m not a fan of bond price pegging.  Nonetheless, I currently believe that the BOJ should peg the yield on 10-year JGBs at 0%.  And the reason is simple; a few months ago the BOJ promised to peg the 10-year at 0%.  With that in mind, this report is worrisome:

Japan’s 10-year yield surged as traders judged the central bank’s expanded bond purchases Friday to be insufficient to cap borrowing costs as global rates advance.

The yield rose as much as 4 basis points to 0.15 percent, the highest since the Bank of Japan implemented its negative rate policy last January.  .  .  .

“It’s not enough,” said Simon Pianfetti, a senior manager in the market solutions department at SMBC Trust Bank Ltd. in Tokyo. “The market will test the BOJ further.” . . .

Kuroda on Tuesday recommitted to his yield-curve control strategy, while pledging to cap bond purchases at 80 trillion yen per year.

That makes no sense.  You cannot “commit” to a 0% bond yield, while at the same time “pledging” to cap purchases to 80 trillion per year.  Perhaps one of my Japanese readers can tell me if something was lost in translation.

I suspect this confusion largely explains the recent rise in the yen, which is bad news for Japan.

In the previous post I expressed puzzlement over Trump’s foreign policy.  Why does Trump seem more concerned about China that Russia?  My sister sent me one possible explanation:

“You have an expansionist Islam and you have an expansionist China. Right? They are motivated. They’re arrogant. They’re on the march. And they think the Judeo-Christian west is on the retreat,” Bannon said during a February 2016 radio show.

On the day Trump was inaugurated, China’s military warned that war between the two countries was a real possibility.

“A ‘war within the president’s term’ or ‘war breaking out tonight’ are not just slogans, they are becoming a practical reality,” an official wrote on the website of the People’s Liberation Army.

Aside from conflict between armies, Bannon repeatedly focused on his perception that Christianity around the world is under threat.

In one radio show, used to promote an article incorrectly claiming that a mosque had been built at the North Pole, Bannon focused heavily on China’s oppression of Christian groups.

I do agree with Bannon that the North Pole is not an appropriate place for a mosque—the South Pole would be far better.  You see, the North Pole is in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, and mosques need solid foundations.

I always wondered why Bannon was unconcerned that Russia had attacked one nation with 40 million people, and another with 4 million, and yet seemed deeply concerned about the aggressive Chinese.  Now we know, in addition to being a racist he’s also a religious bigot who thinks non-Judeo/Christians are bad people.  (At least that’s an improvement over the Spanish Inquisition, where even Jews were excluded from the in-group.)

There’s also this:

The United States and China will fight a war within the next 10 years over islands in the South China Sea, and “there’s no doubt about that”. At the same time, the US will be in another “major” war in the Middle East.

Lots of Trump supporters seemed to think he was the “peace” candidate, and yet his top advisor thinks war with China is inevitable.

I’m certainly no fan of the Chinese policies in the South China Sea.  But instead of threatening tens of millions of people in nations on their borders, the Chinese are threatening the non-human residents of these lonely atolls:

I like tropical fish as much as the next guy, probably more.  But I’m not sure about the wisdom of risking a nuclear war with China to save them.

Steve Bannon sure has some “interesting” theories.  I wonder if those disgruntled steel workers in Ohio know what they voted for when they pulled the lever for Trump.

My sister also wondered whether Trump picking a fight with the new Australian PM was the smartest move, given that we might want their support in the inevitable war with China.

(Just to let you know—if Trump goes to war with China, I’m on China’s side.)

PS.  Bannon’s anti-Asian sentiment also impacts his views on immigration.  I recall when Trump suggested we need more high skilled immigrants and Bannon scolded him by pointing out that that would result in lots of Asians, who don’t share our cultural values.

PPS.  I see on CNBC the Trumpistas are viewing this as a great jobs report.  There were 233,000 new jobs (the sort of figure often seen under Obama), the unemployment rate went up to 4.8% and the year over year wage growth fell from 2.9% to 2.5%.  And whereas Trump said the Obama economy was horrible, we are to believe that this is an excellent report.

Also recall that Trump claimed the Obama unemployment figures were lies and that the true rate was as high as 30% or 40%.  So that implies one of the three following options:

a.  The true unemployment rate fell from at least 30% to just 4.8%, in just one month.

b.  The Trump administration is lying, and the true unemployment rate is still as high as 30% or 40%.

c.  Trump is a pathological liar, and never believed his unemployment conspiracy theories.

I vote for option c.  If you are a Trumpista, please tell me which option you think is true.

PPPS.  On a serious note (finally!), I read the market reaction as stocks up because of the strong 227,000 figure, and bond yields down because of the weak wage growth.  Wall Street loves fast NGDP growth and slow hourly wage growth.  That’s the sweet spot for corporate America.