Trump’s ‘chaos monkey’ reputation putting economy’s future at risk: expert

A prominent economist is warning that Americans’ view of who’s running the economy carries consequences that reach far beyond their mood.University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers argued in his Platypus Economics newsletter on Friday that the problem is the people steering the economy, not the economy itself. Americans are looking ahead and "don't trust who's steering," he wrote. He added that once in a generation the country gets a president "perceived as a chaos monkey."Wolfers did not name President Donald Trump. But he tied the sharpest drop in confidence to the past year and a half, a stretch that overlaps with Trump's return to the White House.The numbers he laid out are stark. Consumer sentiment has hovered near 52, Wolfers wrote, about 30 points below where economic fundamentals suggest it should sit. Americans now feel roughly as bleak as they did in 1980, when unemployment was nearly double today's rate...