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Comment by gizmo385 | Hacker News Reader

Mind extrapolating on that a bit? Do you honestly think that the major stock market indices plummeting around the world is only a story because Trump is president?

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Yes. No one believes he's capable of handling the current crisis. He had the chance to handle it a month ago and he blew it. Worse, he laid off the team that could have prevented this. This is the tech equivalent of laying off your security team and having a massive security breach.

I'm not a Trump enthusiast but your claim 'No one believes he's capable of handling the current crisis' is typical of the thinking that DT is single handedly running the USA. There is a huge administration, DT is the spokesperson for it. The Federal Reserve should shoulder a lot of blame for allowing this financial disaster to happen. Having said that there is a huge shortage of credible and non corrupt politicians in the western world at present and I think globalization is another root cause for the current oil & gas melt down and virus panic. These two elements, corrupt politicians and globalization are related and the tinder for the current conflagration IMO...

DT fired the previous Fed chair and replaced her with a man that was willing to cave to his demands.

She wasn't fired. Rather, her term came to an end, and Trump chose to appoint Powell as chair rather than reappoint Yellen. Yellen would still have been on the board until 2024, but she chose to resign instead. Firing implies her term ended prematurely, which isn't the case.

Constantly threatening someone that they'd be fired will not make someone want to stay at their job. Just saying.

A large part of crisis management is being able to effectively communicate immediate and longer-term plans to help avoid panic. A technocratic manager can fail abysmally at this task (this is a large factor in giving Herbert Hoover poor marks for his handling of the Great Depression; he wasn't).

The problem with Trump is that he neither has the technocratic ability to manage this crisis, nor the charismatic ability to reassure the public. The crash on Thursday was driven in substantial part by Trump's absolute botching of the announcement of new restrictions, and probably part of today's crash is a reaction to the news over the weekend of the extra screening in US airports probably being counterproductive.

The image that the public is getting from Trump right now makes Hoover look good by comparison: it feels like Trump is trying to project an image of good handling of the crisis, and (belatedly) announcing measures to stem the crisis, but failing to actually follow through and ensure that the measures are actually being effective.

Trump has absolutely no credibility or talent for handling it

You say there are other people who can but this ignores the general corruption and lack of talent in this administration as well as the fact that Trump frequently gets in the way of the few people who are talented and trying to take helpful steps

The Fed are a force unto themselves and it's not going well

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/03/16/t...

If he was demonstrating much needed leadership at the moment, he'd have taken bold action, calmed people first which might have calmed the markets. Also, Trump's tax cuts and constant threats to the Fed chair to cut rates (imagine if Fed had cut rates to 0 last year as per his demands) have left us with no levers other than ones which could potentially be catastrophic in the future. I don't think there's any shortage of non-corrupt politicians but I can't point to a single non-corrupt politician on the right (maybe except Romney).

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