"And the other leaving that looks good is the stock market"

 Typical politician. All talk no action. Sounds good. Doesn't work. Never going to happen. Our country is suffering because people like Secretary Clinton have made such bad decisions in terms of our jobs and in terms of what is going on. Now look, we have the worst revival of an economy since the Great Depression. 

And believe me, we are in a bubble right now. And the other leaving that looks good is the stock market. But if you raise interest rates even a little bit that is going to come crashing down. 

We are in a big fat ugly bubble. And we better be awfully careful. And we had a Fed that is doing political things. This Janet Yellen of the Fed, the Fed is doing political by keeping interest rates at this level. 

And believe me the day Obama goes off and he leaves and he goes out to the golf course for the rest of his life to play golf, when they raise interest rates, you are going to see some very bad things happen because the Fed is not doing their job. The Fed is being more political than Secretary Clinton.

- Donald Trump, Debate 9-26-2016

Other than one econ commentator and the World Socialist Web Site (Clinton-Trump debate: A degrading spectacle) this outburst received little attention. Hardly surprising given the almost random referential web of Trump's performance in the debate. But the first virtue that is mentioned by his supporters, at least in polite society, is that he is a successful businessman, And here is America's most famous rich man, running for president, and he is alerting his audience that the stock market has nowhere near the worth that its current prices would indicate. Trump has plenty of experience with bubbles and knows where they end. The alarm he is sounding is no joke.

Has he shorted the market, perhaps anticipating an adverse reaction to his election? Is he trying to force a crash to undermine the continuance of Democratic control of the White House which he is claiming is the policy of the Fed? I don't think we have to answer these to get to the ground of what is going on here, to use them to see the political structure of the campaign the Republican Party is using, however it may protest its reluctance to do so.

And there is more that we can regard as symptomatic rather than descriptive. The "political things" that the Fed is doing reminds me of Tracy Powers' vision of "the media" ensuring Obama's election eight years ago (The Media Is Behind All of This). One could get the impression that the Republican Party is feeling more dispensable than it would like. Their role since Nixon has been to provide a politically acceptable avenue to balloon credit through military spending and that role has limited value at present.

Why is Trump criticizing Yellen? Fed policy cannot allow itself to move too far outside the consensus space of the financial powers, that is, it cannot long ignore ruling class opinion. If, indeed, the Fed is trying to avoid upsetting the apple cart at the close of the Obama administration and, therefore, favoring the election of its designated heiress then Trump is not furthering his position by blasting it. It is an even worse strategy than McCain's waffling on TARP. But Trump, swearing fealty to each and every dark power in the Republican universe, does not feel constrained to also genuflect at the altar of capitalist orthodoxy.

He may not be afraid of losing this election and sticking around to pick up the pieces of Clinton's administration when financial crisis re-emerges. Or, if elected after all, he will likely be content to let Yellen have her way and blame her and Obama when it all comes apart. In either case he is offering no alternative policy at all. Not even a bombastic assertion of the power of his indomitable will.

So why is it part of his repertoire? It would not have appeared in the debate if it had not elicited positive feedback on the stump or in bull sessions before hand. Its value, like everything he says as he stabs with his circled thumb and forefinger, lies in a negative charge of truth. Things are bad. As the party in power, the Democrats are loath to admit how bad they are. It is not insignificant that Clinton completely ignored this part of Trump's performance. Nor was it criticized anywhere in the media that I have seen. And that is what gives Trump, a man with no policies at all, purchase with the American electorate.

The Fed has been in the same tight spot for eight years. It would love to return to a pattern of accommodate and squeeze but it cannot. Accommodation, the bubble, is the only thing keeping the financial system afloat. The "political things" the Fed is doing are less to uphold the Democratic Party than to preserve the international financial system, capitalism, in short.

This crisis, climate change, war, everyone is aware of what is happening. Sanders and Trump have been able to convey a sense of solidarity with this general anxiety, Sanders by raising the political banner of the working class, however carefully, and Trump by his pantomime of hatred for all things upsetting to those who continue to take comfort in the structures of power. When voters say they distrust Clinton it is perhaps because they cannot tell whether she is hiding what she knows about how bad things are or is genuinely oblivious.