Will Public Pensions Be Trump’s Biggest Challenge?

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Dear friends,

Over the past week, as the Trump rally has marched on, I’ve been on the receiving end of an entirely different sort of unexpected acclaim. It started with an hour-long interview I did with Real Vision’s Grant Williams that is going ‘viral’ (I’m still new to these terms given I was inside the Federal Reserve for so long where social media was banned, and with good reason.)

Public Pensions

The subjects covered in the extensive interview, filmed just after the election, include prospects for the Fed under the new administration, what had the Italians so piping mad and most of all, public pensions. It was this last subject that most captured the media’s attention, catching me off guard.

Some subjects such as global debt and public pension shortfalls are so massive that most choose to pretend they don’t exist. An entire cottage industry has sprung up to debunk any concerns about that little $200 trillion global debt issue, even as Libor skips upwards. It’s as if Reinhart & Rogoff’s work on record debt inducing stagnation never existed.

As for public pensions, earlier this week, I observed that Meredith Whitney’s bearish call, as aired on 60 Minutes, marked the beginning of the end of the public’s concerns. So coordinated was the campaign to disprove Whitney’s timeline that her entire body of work ended up vanishing into thin air.

And so we have learned to live with elephants in our rooms. The alternative doomsday scenarios are simply too big to get our heads around. That’s all good and well unless our mothers were right, you remember, that thing about ignoring problems not making them go away.

In the event you don’t follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, a) congratulations as you live a much less frenzied, information-overloaded, cluttered life, and b) please enjoy the links to a five-minute slice of the Real Vision interview as well as the three articles in which I was featured this week.

Wishing you a joyous and warm holiday weekend.

All best,

Danielle

What’s racier than Vegas? Pensions, says former Fed insider @DiMartinoBooth.

A Pensions Time Bomb Spells Disaster for the US Economy — Business Insider

Former Fed Adviser: ‘Some Miracle’ Needed to Defuse $1.3 Billion Pensions Time Bomb — Newsmax

Danielle DiMartino Booth on the Trump Federal Reserve — Investopedia

Article by Danielle DiMartino Booth, Fed Up: An Insider’s Take on the Willful Ignorance and Elitism At the Federal Reserve

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