Trump and the Chinese Stock Market

President Trump

I have been told by more that one person that President Trump likes to get daily updates on how the Chinese stock market is doing.

It appears that he sees almost all of finance and economics as a zero sum game. If the Chinese stock market is up, he apparently sees it as a negative for the United States.

This dovetails with a bizarre report from The New York Times on how intelligence officers are crafting their reports to please the president:

Intelligence officials who brief the president have warned him about Chinese espionage in bottom-line business terms. They have used Black Sea shipping figures to demonstrate the effect of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. And they have filled the daily threat briefing with charts and graphs of economic data.

In an effort to accommodate President Trump, who has attacked them publicly as “naïve” and in need of going “back to school,” the nation’s intelligence agencies have revamped their presentations to focus on subjects their No. 1 customer wants to hear about — economics and trade.

Intelligence officers, steeped in how Mr. Trump views the world, now work to answer his repeated question: Who is winning? 

Folks, we have a loon as a president.

-RW