UNGA Recap: Trump, Traffic, and Global Inaction

Traffic in Midtown New York may be a little better this week.

The high-level United Nations General Assembly is now in the rearview mirror.

It is the first UN General Assembly since Trump slash foreign aid, and thousands were in New York last week for the 80th session of the UN, where global leaders gathered for high-level talks.

Also dozens of officials leaving when Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu took to the podium.

We also have seen some developments in the war in Ukraine.

Trump thinks Ukraine can win back all lost territory, and Russia is denying any interest in expanding the war against the EU or NATO members.

And over the weekend, Trump posting a cartoon where he fires that Jerome Powell.

Well here on Wall Street this morning, we are looking at stock futures pointing to.

Higher open.

Joining us now is Patrick E Young, chairman and founder of Exchange Invest.

Patrick, good morning and good afternoon to you where you are.

So first and foremost, Trump dealt with technical difficulties at the UN last week, which garnered plenty of headlines and tabloids.

But besides heavy traffic, what were your takeaways from the UNGA?

Oh, the UNGA this year was another case of Plusachange.

We had lots of people who are terribly self-important, all gathering together to manage to achieve absolutely nothing.

They had a series of different debates, all of which were pretty much student politics and of course also got nowhere.

And then Donald Trump turned up in the middle of the week and actually did in one sense what all the South American dictators or Middle Eastern dictators tend to do at the UN General Assembly, which has talked for much, much longer than their allocated time.

And of course here we.

Donald Trump being deeply offended as a lifelong hotelier by the fact that the United Nations has this vast budget from all the countries in the world and they can't manage to run an elevator or a teleprompt, so that doesn't really make you terribly inspired that they're going to do terribly well about, say, bringing peace to the rest of the world.

And ultimately therefore, it was interesting to hear of the fact that Trump is effectively saying, look, I love the concept guys, but actually your execution is utterly too star dismal.

And Patrick, of course, geopolitics remain front and center stage as we kick off the trading week.

Now Trump saying that Ukraine can win back lost territory and Russia is saying it won't expand the war.

But what do you think comes next?

Well, obviously what's happened here is there's a huge shot across the bars which is effectively Donald Trump has said, Vlad, you may be mad, but I'm exasperated, and that's what we're looking at now because ultimately Putin has tried to push the envelope at all points in time and it's releasing a frustration that Trump is not being appreciated as to what goes on.

Very interesting to.

See the idea of Sergey Lavrov turning around and saying, oh no, no, no, we've no ambitions to go into Europe.

Well, of course they don't because the Russians wouldn't survive 5 minutes once the Americans got involved, of course it could be a problem with, say, the German army which could be taken out by the average high school football team these days.

But the whole point about it is there is not going to be an attack on the EU or NATO.

Where we're going to end up with Ukraine is entirely now down to whether or not Putin wants to be pragmatic, but at the same time, of course, one of the difficulties the United States of America has is that its own backlog, its stockpiles of weapons have been hugely depleted by the previous regime of Biden sending lots of things to the Ukrainians and not actually making replacements.

And Patrick, while I have you here, I do want to shift our focus on over to a different type of policy, and that is monetary policy.

We all know that Trump has floated the idea of firing Powell for months and Powell's term is up in 8 months.

So how do you see all of this playing out?

Well, obviously the thing is that if Powell had any common sense, he would resign and walk out with his pride and tact, whereas instead he now wants to suffer some sort of ongoing Stockholm syndrome from the president basically beating him up.

But this is in truth the absolute apotheosis of what has been the problem of central bankers for the last 10 or 20 years.

They really think they're in charge of everything and worse still, not only do they think they're in charge of everything, they think they're doing a good job.

Ergo, look at the inflation, look at the amounts of money that have been spent and wasted on quantitative easing around the world.

And actually the truth of the matter is the cadre of central bankers are incredibly arrogant and while in certain casts of the financial markets we may think, oh, they're useful for continuing to pump prime stocks and other assets, their ultimate history books are not going to view them particularly successfully because they did not help industry.

And finally, Patrick, before I let you go, all eyes are on the nation's capital today.

There are a lot of gatherings taking place, but the SEC and CFTC are holding a roundtable on regulatory harmonization efforts, and a representative from NYSE's parent company ICE will be attending.

So what are your expectations for this gathering?

Well, this is a spectacular gathering.

I mean we're talking about Jeff Sprecher, the greatest entrepreneur in the history of financial market structure ever, Chairman and CEO of ICE, is going to be turning up alongside the fabulous Adina Friedman of NASDAQ.

Also there's going to be the Permitan Eltel, the boss of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Terry Duffy.

There's even the new CEO of the CBOE is going to be making appearances as well.

So it's a really heavy hitter.

Group and they're going to be talking about two things effectively.

One is in the background.

MAGA would love the idea of merging the SEC and CFTC.

I'm not sure that's such a great idea.

I'm not sure it politically flies, but certainly trying to get the SEC and the CFTC more on the same page about regulation and moving markets forward is very important, while also there are obviously a lot of questions to be asked about what is the future of crypto regulation.

OK, Patrick, well, we will have to leave it there, but as always, thank you so much for joining us and thank you for your insights.