Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite My Face…Again
Let’s face facts.
If you have a significant amount of money invested in the stock market, the chances are that, no matter how much you might hate Donald Trump, you are secretly very happy with how the stock market has performed on his watch.
If you don’t have any money invested in the market, well, you might not be so happy with Donald Trump, especially if you took a hit on your income taxes last year.
The surging stock market causes me grief…actual physical grief…because I want the stock market to take a dump in order to disaffect as many people as possible from Trump on the basis of their pocketbook issues.
This puts me in the horrible position of finding myself rooting against the home team.
(Disclaimer: A long, long time ago, I was a bond analyst for the venerable investment firm of Thompson McKinnon. I have also made – and lost – a lot of money in the stock market. I no longer play with stocks. Once burnt, twice shy. Burnt three times….c’est la vie and, for that matter, c’est dommage!)
I haven’t felt this badly since the summer of 1968, when I was pining away at my desk at Thompson McKinnon while all my friends were getting tear gassed at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Those were the days.
Now, every time I happen to notice that the market has put in another high during a bull rush, I mourn for what this means for the Democratic party’s hopes in 2020.
If you believe, as I do, that the future of this country – and perhaps the planet – depends upon removing Donald Trump’s fat ass from the Oval Office and sitting his junk down in a prison cell, preferably at the Guantanamo Bay branch of Club Fed, then you have to be wishing for the mother of all stock market crashes.
Isn’t that nuts? Hoping for a huge reversal in the market to wake people up to the reality of Donald Trump’s inability to rule wisely?
But this is where we are at right now.
Americans -just like everyone else – vote their pocketbooks. You may not want to believe that because neither you nor any of your friends want Trump around, regardless of how your retirement portfolio looks right now. Right?
Unfortunately, more than 54 percent of all American FAMILIES are invested in the market, according to a 2017 Gallop Poll, reported in this Politifact California article. With an adult population of around 248 million in 2010, this indicates that there’s a potential voting block of around 124 million Americans who have benefited at least to some extent by the rise in the value of the stock market.
This group represents the largest single voting block in the history of the United States…and I think it is safe to say that the majority of those shareholders in America, Incorporated will vote for whomever promises to keep the markets rolling along while also promising not to tax their winnings as if they were regular income, which is the single biggest tax dodge in the IRS code.
Look at it this way: Together, Clinton and Trump gathered 128 million votes in 2016.
We all know that the popular vote doesn’t matter in presidential elections. We also know that the 2016 election was swung by less than 107,000 votes by giving Trump the win in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
If the stock market continues to surge over the next 15 months, Trump may be renewed for a second four years, like being forced to take out a book that you borrowed from the library once before and being forced to read it again, even though you hated every minute of the first reading.
That thought depresses the hell out of me.
07/01/2019 @ 1:54 pm
I totally disagree. (and as a disclaimer I “have a significant amount of money invested in the stock market” and used to run an investment firm).
I am still frequently in touch with many of my prior “heavily invested” clients and I can tell you that both they and I give the Trump administration zero credit for the current market. The current market is, in “our” opinion, in a market wide bubble being “inflated” by some pretty sketchy actions by Big Wall Street. They are warping the hell out of the SEC rules and it IS going to have some serious repercussions in the near future.
In fact, Imma betting that Boeing “crashing” is going to start the ball rolling down the hill to the point that it is going to “semi-crash” the dollar. (which is why I have over 25% of my portfolio invested in Swiss francs, palladium and gold right now).
07/01/2019 @ 4:21 pm
Amy, I think you misread part of my post. i DON’T have any money invested in the stock market. Lost my shirt in the market, twice, never going back there again.
07/01/2019 @ 4:29 pm
I didn’t say you did, Alan. What I said was that I have some major investments and that I also know a bunch of MY former clients that agree that Trump has nothing to do with the current bubble.
07/01/2019 @ 4:41 pm
As far as crediting Trump with the boom market, I completely agree with you. Trump’s actions are probably paving the road to ruin. Boeing is in serious trouble, but so is Ford, along with whatever they are calling Fiat Chrysler now. Sears is going down the tubes, Macy’s is on the skids. Toys r US is gone. Housing market for new home sales is either stagnant or strong depending upon who you listen to, et cetera, ad naseum. The list goes on forever.
There is however a widespread impression that Trump is doing things that are contributing to the growth in market value, regardless of whether it is true. It is certainly a constant theme among Trump apologists or I have heard. In addition, it is indisputable that Trump has laid out a fine dinner table for the very rich with the Trump tax cuts.
The question of the strength of the dollar is another matter. The current Republican philosophy is that neither deficit nor debt matter. My instinct is that it can’t be good to keep racking up more and more debt…but the question still remains, where are you going to go.Swiss francs? The relative sizes of the US and Swiss economies means to me that everyone can’t move from dollars to francs because there aren’t enough Swiss francs to go around, and the Swiss aren’t about to print more francs. They simply don’t have the industrial infrastructure to support a massive shift to their currency.
Since you are not in Euros or sterling, I am going to guess that you would agree that neither of these currencies have the resilience to survive a serious market reversal without going into the toilet. The pound isn’t what it ever was. Russian rubles at the rate of $.0.016 to $1 is no sane investor’s idea of a safe haven, and who the hell wants to reward the Russians for their petro policies. China is sitting on more than $1 trillion worth of empty ghost cities that the Chinese constructed because they simply had nowhere else to put that money without causing runaway inflation that would shatter their economic miracle.
07/01/2019 @ 2:47 pm
I think Amy has this right and yet I do, as Alan seems to, feel torn when i think of those who WILL give the oaf undue credit.
07/01/2019 @ 4:32 pm
There are still a lot of people who are giving the oaf credit for “draining the swamp” even though he is one of the biggest reptiles in it, FFS. Luckily, if we can get a quality candidate nominated (which is no sure thing with the DNC as it is) there will be a LOT more of us voting than there are of them.
07/01/2019 @ 4:45 pm
The key remains the question of where those votes turn up. We know where the focus of effort has to be…Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida….but there are four or five other states that could be bought by the Republicans, which means that the Democrats have to focus their efforts on turning out the vote in eight key states. Without a very high quality candidate, with the right platform, I am very fearful that we are going to lose the whole ball game…and I shudder when I write those words.
07/01/2019 @ 4:45 pm
I don’t think most people will vote based on the market. For one thing, you can gamble on the market and you can gamble on the existence of a decent safety net. Safety nets are less likely to crash. And I think at this point too many are too disgusted in other ways. His core is as solid as ever, but his core isn’t big enough to keep him in office unless they get either a lot of outside support or, like the last election, a lot of outside apathy/disgust at a Democratic candidate.
07/01/2019 @ 4:54 pm
No, Kosh, no one who would agree with any of us would vote based on the market, but there are millions of people who are looking at their much fatter 401Ks, listen to what the Democrats are proposing to do and how they are proposing to pay for it. Some of them won’t be fooled, but I am not sanguine about betting the farm on a popular uprising of the middle classes, when they have mortgages, college and retirement to think about. Charity begins at home.
We under-estimated Trump very badly in 2016. (Well, I didn’t but we did.) Yes, he lost the popular vote. Yes, he lost the popular vote. Yes, he is sitting on Air Force One right now because of 107,000 in three states…but he is now an incumbent president now, with the intrinsic inertia that an incumbent brings to the gun fight.
My point is simple: I wish to hell and back that the Democrats would campaign on the return to civility, to due process, conservation, climate change, and a dozen other things where I think that we could find general agreement….but I don’t see that happening.
07/06/2019 @ 11:35 am
The stock market is not the economy……Most Americans do not have enough invested in the market to make an appreciable difference in their lives or life styles….The average kitchen table discussions do not include dividends or futures.