RiskHedge Radio

In a compelling RiskHedge podcast interview, a former senior advisor to six presidents of the United States says there is a growing disconnect between President Donald Trump and his National Security Advisor, former Army General H.R. McMaster.

“[Trump] keeps McMaster around,” says Dr. Harald Malmgren, “but I’m told that he really finds McMaster tedious with his long lectures. So it wouldn’t surprise me at all at some point if he appoints McMaster in charge of the Afghanistan operation, because it was McMaster who was the strongest proponent for more troops in Afghanistan.”

Dr. Malmgren, the man who was famously personally dispatched by President Richard Nixon to inform the Europeans of the decision to move the US off the gold standard in 1971, says McMaster’s relationship with Trump and former Marine generals Chief of Staff John Kelly and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, along with the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine General Joseph Dunford, “is not wonderful.”

“McMaster is also an academic in a way. You know he writes books, one of which was about Vietnam. And his feeling is that during the Vietnam War, the generals should have stood up to the president and educated the president,” explains Dr. Malmgren. “So, what McMaster does when he meets with everybody is he gives lectures on, ‘Let me explain to you how the world works.’ And that’s tedious not only for Trump, but is tedious for the generals.”

In the expansive podcast interview with RiskHedge’s Jonathan Roth, Dr. Malmgren says he’s never worked in a White House with as many personality conflicts as this current one.

“This is inexplicable. If you wrote about this as a novel, nobody would believe it,” declares Dr. Malmgren. “It begins with President Trump himself, who has a long career in property development: real estate, hotels, casinos, and such things. That business does not involve managing large numbers of people.”

But, as Dr. Malmgren explains, there are individuals in Trump’s cabinet that have world-class experience managing lots of people.

“Someone like (Secretary of State) Tillerson, who ran Exxon, one of the biggest corporations in the world, has years of experience managing hundreds of thousands of employees, dozens of top executives—all of whom have big egos—building consensus, because that's what you do in such a job. But this is not something Trump is familiar with. So, he doesn't like and doesn't quite grasp the idea that delegation means you give somebody the responsibility and then you let them do it and you don't backseat drive them. So, he tries very hard to get involved in everything himself. Now that creates confusion because when someone serious is given a task, they're not sure whether [Trump] might do something different from what they're planning. So, it tends to mess up the long-range trajectory that you need to build to get something done, whether it's health care or tax changes.”

The fascinating interview with one of Washington’s old hands also covers the role Vice President Pence is playing (“He’s the guy who keeps the machinery functioning”), what power interim White House Communications Director Hope Hicks wields (“the commonsense balancer in the room”), and why Trump’s relationship with Congress is on the ropes (“The most common comment I hear from old friends on the Hill is, ‘I've got no one to bargain with’”).

Listen to the full 28-minute podcast above.

A woman who spent nine years as an advisor to Richard Fisher at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas says the Fed isn’t protecting the US dollar, has become too political and needs to change. In an exclusive RiskHedge interview, Danielle DiMartino Booth, author of Fed Up: An Insider’s Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America, describes an institution she believes is almost out of control. “It’s not a political body, but it has become highly political and dangerous,” declares DiMartino Booth. “I call it the fourth branch of the US government, but with no checks and balances.”

Many pundits are waving their arms about a looming risk of a game-changing economic crash due to one existential threat or another.

I have a different opinion: the US economy is now effectively impervious to any sustained economic downturn.

That’s because the US government has taken unto itself virtually unlimited powers to deal with any serious threats to the economy.

Padnos is a freelance journalist who, in 2012, was kidnapped in Syria and held captive by elements of al-Qaeda and al-Nusra Front. He was released two years later, following negotiations led by the head of Qatar State Security.

In a wide-ranging interview with RiskHedge’s Jonathan Roth, Padnos explains this new entity that’s growing in Syria.

“There’s a second Islamic State; it’s right on the Turkish border,” explains Padnos. “To get to this second Islamic State from any European country, it’s a couple of days on the bus. Young kids are going every day—that’s what the guys on the ground in Syria are telling me: ‘Oh yes, we have new French people, new English people every day.’”

The former captive says the Syrian government is winning the war in Syria, but the victory is coming with a cost. “[The Syrian Army] is dispersing the rebels,” reports Padnos. “The rebels have been concentrating in certain urban neighborhoods, and now they’re going off into the countryside. They’re occupying villages. And when the US Army or the Kurds or some combination finally arrives in Raqqa [the capital of the Islamic State], all those ISIS fighters—they will have been gone for weeks. They’re out of town now.”

Padnos isn’t shy about describing what he believes is happening in Syria today and the implications for the United States and the West. “We must develop a strategy that is more powerful than their ‘fade into the hills’ strategy. Otherwise, it will be whack-a-mole forever… If it sounds like I’m advocating for peace with ISIS, well I am. There’s too many of them to kill.”

There have been questions raised about Trump’s ties to dirty Russian money, but Geopolitical Futures' chairman George Friedman says many people were doing business in Russia prior to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

“This is not to defend Trump,” explains Friedman, “it is simply to point out that prior to 2014 there was nothing at all questionable about wanting to build a hotel in Russia.”

Scott Taylor, the editor and publisher of military magazine Esprit de Corps, believes President Donald Trump has made a good decision picking Lt. General H.R. McMaster to replace Mike Flynn as National Security Advisor.

Taylor, a war correspondent who has covered conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, the former Yugoslavia, Libya, and the Western Sahara, says McMaster brings a broad depth of knowledge to the job.

Taylor met McMaster after being kidnapped and held by Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists in northern Iraq while reporting on the US invasion in 2004. Held for 5 days, Taylor was brutally tortured before being released—at the time, one of the only Western hostages to have ever been released by Al-Qaeda.

McMaster asked Taylor to address American troops under his command following Taylor’s release, and the two have been in regular contact since.

In a revealing interview, Neil Howe—the co-author of The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny—candidly discusses his perspective on Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s Chief Strategist and former head of the online news site Breitbart.

Bannon is a proponent of the theory that history generally moves in 80-year cycles, with each cycle ending in a crisis that destroys the old order and ushers in something new. It’s an idea proposed by Howe in The Fourth Turning.

President Donald Trump’s efforts on trade are damaging America’s standing in the world, according to one of the United States’ top economic thinkers. “There is no question that we are, in my mind, weaker today than we were a month ago,” says Sam Rines, “when it comes to both our standing globally in trade, and our standing in terms of being the global leader of free enterprise and capitalism.”

Rines, Senior Economist and Portfolio Strategist at Avalon Advisors in Houston, Texas, gave RiskHedge Radio’s Jonathan Roth a blunt assessment of Trump’s ideas, while also addressing the Federal Reserve’s predicted interest rate hikes.

Despite a very uncertain economic forecast, Rines does see areas where investors should put their money. Find out what they are in this RiskHedge Radio interview.

Louis Gave, one of the finance world’s top China experts and the founding partner and CEO of Gavekal Research, is “concerned” about the heated rhetoric that is being exchanged between the US and China since the election of Donald Trump.

The global economy is inevitably interconnected. With so many possible trigger points, something is bound to go wrong...and the implications will be felt everywhere.