Donald Trump just wants to know one thing on Thursday.
Is your 409K (with a “9” and a capital “K”) looking good, or isn’t it?
“STOCK MARKET AT ALL-TIME HIGH!”, the president shrieked, into the digital void on Thursday, as US equities summited fresh peaks in a relief rally catalyzed by the purported abatement of tensions with Iran. He continued:
HOW ARE YOUR 409K’S DOING? 70%, 80%, 90% up? Only 50% up! What are you doing wrong?
It would have been an absurd tweet on its own without Trump conjuring a new class of retirement savings account.
The president was immediately lampooned by millions of Twitter users. “My 409k” is now a trending topic.
The president has, of course, reveled in the stock market’s performance since his election, and he leverages the fear of a collapse to marshal support for his 2020 campaign.
“If for some reason [I don’t win] the 2020 election, you’ll see this economy go down the tubes”, he warned in August, when the economy looked like it was, in fact, going “down the tubes” thanks to the trade war.
“You have no choice but to vote for me because your 401(k)s – down the tubes”, he continued, at a rally. “Everything’s gonna be down the tubes”.
Trump, more than any other president, views the Dow as something of a real-time job approval barometer and whenever stocks hit record highs, he starts asking “How’s your 401(k) doing?” at rallies and fundraisers.
The sad reality is that a good portion of Trump’s base likely doesn’t participate in a 401(k) or own any stocks at all, for that matter.
(Fed data)
We’ve been over this on countless occasions, but just to reiterate, it seems highly unlikely that Trump’s base is benefiting all that much from the inexorable rise in equities. And even if they are benefiting, financial assets are disproportionately concentrated in the hands of the rich.
Here’s how Ben Hunt once put it:
The goodies of a trebled stock market aren’t evenly distributed. Who owns stocks? If we’re talking about households, leaving aside pension funds and endowments and other institutional investors, it’s the rich, mostly. And that household share of the Central Bankers’ Bubble doesn’t increase linearly with wealth, but exponentially, meaning that the really rich own a lot more stocks than the merely rich, so the really rich have gotten a lot richer than the merely rich.
And if the “really rich” like, say, Jeff Bezos, are getting “exponentially” richer than the “merely rich” like, say, Steve Mnuchin, well then you can extrapolate what that means for the likes of Gwynne Abrams, an unemployed nanny in Henderson, Nev., who told The Washington Post in 2017 how she scraped together $78 in nanny money to donate to Trump’s “cause” during the Mueller probe.
At least Mnuchin gets the satisfaction of knowing that even if Bezos is now more than 300 times richer than him thanks to the gargantuan rise in Amazon’s share price, the money Jeff spends is literally signed “Mnuchin”.
I don’t think you’re going to see “Gwynne Abrams, Certified Nanny” scrawled on your dollar bills any time soon.
Read more: One-Percenters Now Control As Much Wealth As Middle-, Upper-Middle Classes Combined
409K? Isn’t that a spray cleaner you use on your stove?
Normally anyone that shoes the hubris trump shows gets a reality check. It is amazing how he never really does.
Honestly he is either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest, or has a deal with the devil.
I have never seen it before. Even Tiger Woods was humbled at one point.
Exactly. It astounds me how much he is able to get away with. He doesn’t even make attempts to hide it in many instances – just blatant lying, grandstanding and general crassness.