From Senior Energy Analyst Robert Rapier

Here are a few thoughts that had not occurred to me:

When companies get caught “cooking the books,” the fallout is generally brutal. We’ve seen it before—Enron, WorldCom—where shady accounting led to total collapse and bankruptcy. Even when a company survives, trust is shattered, and the stock can stay in the gutter for years.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if the U.S. could face a similar danger. If our government starts manipulating or burying economic data to avoid bad news, there will be a reckoning.

The warning signs would be there: inconsistencies in reports, numbers that don’t add up, and growing doubt from investors and foreign governments. And unless we go full authoritarian, that kind of deception can’t be hidden forever.

If it ever got bad enough, the fallout could be massive—foreign investors pulling out of U.S. markets, interest rates spiking, stocks tanking, and the shockwaves rippling across the globe.

We’re not there yet. But early warning lights are blinking.

The “early warning lights” to which Rapier refers are, of course, Trump’s challenging statistics that make him look bad, e.g., the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics fiasco.

It’s too much to hope that Trump will change his ways and somehow become sane and honest.  However, it’s reasonable to hope that Trump will be gone before our nation loses its credibility in the world of global finance and is rendered as irrelevant as Enron.