“The sea was angry that day, my friends.”

The waters were a bit choppy on Wall Street ahead of the all-important (or not, considering the Fed’s going to cut either way) October jobs report.

Results from Apple and Amazon had the potential to turn the tide, but I’d be remiss not to mention the worst day for big-tech since a couple of rocky sessions post-Labor Day and the worst two-session stretch since the August growth scare.

Needless to say, the proximate cause of Thursday’s malaise was Microsoft and Meta, both of which dropped sharply as investors frowned at the juxtaposition between unbridled AI spend and a growth outlook that failed to clear a Cloud-high (get it?) bar.

It’s a stretch to call the weakness in those two names “justified.” The numbers were fine. If there’s blame to be apportioned, it’s surely to investors themselves. If you’re determined that nothing’s going to be good enough, then nothing will be.

I’ve said this repeatedly in recent years, and I’ll say it again: If a big beat and raise is the de facto bar to clear for a given name to avoid a steep post-earnings selloff, then there’s a sense in which “beat and raise” has no meaning. If the bare minimum is a top-line print a mile ahead of consensus and a likewise lofty revenue guide, then those numbers (the “beats”) are the consensus.

Microsoft had its worst day in years. But it’s fine. I mean, I guess it’s not fine if you’re the type of person who sweats bullets about a 5% haircut to a name that’s up 200% in four and a half years, but for everyone else, it’s fine. These companies will be fine.

What may not be fine, though, is America. Over the past two or three days, the level of alarm and anxiety around the election, and specifically around the prospect of a return to office for Donald Trump, seems to have increased. I don’t have any hard data to back that assessment up, exactly, and I don’t want to traffic in conspiracy theories, but Trump seems to be keying on betting odds in paper-thin — i.e., easily manipulatable — markets to make the case that he’s leading the race by what, historically speaking, would be a nearly insurmountable margin. And with less than a week to go. Some people see in that an effort to lay the groundwork for a post-election campaign to undermine the vote in the event of a loss. Hence a late awakening to the inherent, and on a lot of vectors existential, risks.

“[The US dollar’s] global role has been underpinned by the rule of law,” an alarming Bloomberg article published Thursday read. “Some investors warn of erosion of longer-term US confidence.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’ve been saying that in these pages for years. The foundation upon which the dollar’s reserve currency status is built is the rule of law. Trump’s the antithesis of the rule of law, and if you don’t understand why, you don’t know what “rule of law” actually means.

I like very much my friends, acquaintances and second-hand contacts on Wall Street, but with apologies to them, I say this to you: Those folks by and large don’t understand the election stakes anymore than a political scientist understands how to trade options. The last US election didn’t (didn’t, didn’t, didn’t) end with the peaceful transfer of power. It dead-ended (and you can take “dead” literally) in a riot on the steps of the Capitol — an attempt to violently overthrow the US government, orchestrated by a man who may very well be reelected next week.

If you’re going to worry, worry about that, not Microsoft or Meta or Apple or Amazon, which’ll all be fine, democracy or not. Worry about what an autocratic America will mean for you, your family, borrowing costs on the nation’s debt, the currency and so on. As one FX strategist put it, in remarks for the linked Bloomberg article, “The American exceptionalism narrative could end if traders lose faith in US institutions.”