Investors Are Learning To Live With A Post-Democracy America

15 thoughts on “Investors Are Learning To Live With A Post-Democracy America”

1. We’re human, we love confirmation bias. US markets have worked in investors’ interests for a long time, overlooking a few hiccups from which they recovered quickly on an historical basis. Liberation day scared us, then we looked around for other options and decided to stay right where we are. It’s not pretty. Actually the whole thing is ugly as hell. There are a few, very few strands of hope left, but they’re directly in the king’s sights and will most likely fall before the end of 2025. The odds of having an election in 2026 is rapidly heading to zero. I can’t figure out why most Americans don’t give a damn. The globe is warming, country infrastructure gets worse everyday, water and food quality are poor, the administrative state is on life support, health care is expensive and often subpar unless you have lots of bucks and citizens continue to load up on guns, all while Trump continues to build a personal police force called ICE. What could go wrong. “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone” – trite but true.

   1. We’ll always have elections. Even the USSR had elections. The illusion of choice is a powerful motivator.

   2. It’s pretty obvious why they don’t care – stocks go up. The people that don’t own stocks care – the people that do could care less. More AI bubble please, more gold, more crypto scams.

      It’s purely a market based decision

2. H hasn’t used the laundry-pile analogy for some time (it’s a cyclical device) but it seems apt here. With respect to private-sector securities, US assets will likely remain the cleanest shirt in the laundry pile in any MAGAnomic global recession scenario. Stonks gonna stonk.

   Capitulation to authoritarianism is more clearly signaled in Treasury yields where there’s no doubt that the market has cozied up to the US again.

   Is there a breaking point for the latter behavior? At the very least I’d expect sovereigns to divest of treasuries to reduce US leverage over them. No doubt they’re scrabbling to find (and to legally authorize) alternatives.

3. The border-less country of Billionaire, also known as Wealth, which has always had power in the US, has finally had enough of ‘representative democracy’ as the threat of even small tax increases and rules to prevent them from dumping dioxin, pcb’s and mercury in poor neighborhoods and having the middle class dare to tell THEM what they can and cannot do (‘deep state’ after all is Billionaire for ‘middle-class’). So the threat of accountability was all it took to finally take any illusion the middle-class had any other purpose but to bail out their bad bets, pay most the taxes, provide exit liquidity, and war funds as well as provide a farm to grow girls and boys to be used up as sex toys and status symbols beyond the Rolexes, Bentley’s and Gucci bags. When Trump pardoned Blagovovich, that was all you really needed to see for what was coming.

   I found you and your writing before you started this blog, and signed up instantly your pay wall went up as the only liberal voice I found in finance. I hope in the future, you can write more to us than to the lost MAGA credit middle managers and car lot dealers you seem to think are reachable. How will we survive this bullshit Wealth has forced on us, so we can get or stay rich, and hopefully reunite to take freedom back? I have found the people who voted for Trump are unmoved by losses, and keep shouting TDS. I yell back that they have STD syndrome. “Sucking Trumps Dick.” Fact is a large proportion of a populace is genetically on the authoritarian follower spectrum. Nothing you can do can change that. I just hope the killing fields every far right wing power has inflicted never shows up here. But in that, history is bleak.

   Thanks again for keeping the torch aloft. You’re not alone.

   1. +1

   2. The killing fields are already upon us. Trump loves the idea (and finality) of killing. He doesn’t quite know how he will do it inside our borders (LA is a test, along with Chicago soon), but he practices on drug boats, illegals and the like to test the reaction in his base. Believe me he has a target list to start out on.

      1. Trump watched too many 80s action movies (except the ones about Russians). Why shouldn’t the good guys just gun down the bad guys? Look at them with their shifty eyes and different ethnicities!

         Unfortunately, Trump also seems to possess the plot armor of an 80s action hero.

      2. I believe we are experiencing a “Sochi honeymoon”. Trump himself is not a the ballot in ’26. The biggest fireworks will occur after the ’28 Olympics on the run-in to the Nov. election.

         1. Trump cult is on the ballot in 2026. Hopefully some sanity will drill into the brains of enough of us to say Whoa !

4. There were no bears when Hoover won in 1928 and havinf a business mane in charge was Wall Steet’s dream. Nixon won 49 states in 1972 and Barron’s could fin no predictors of a down martket. Trump was hailed as the Billionaire’s hero. Everyone ‘that counts’ is long (there are no big buyers left) and what we are seeing is distribution in the old historical sense. Trump will fail, but he could make the economy a shambles – hopefully not a Gaza.

5. The implications are frightening. Maybe everyone throughout history has felt this way: but I believe our best times were in the past.
   Known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns in our future. Keeping 12-24 months of living expenses in not quite, but pretty close to, “cash”.

6. I’ll be man enough to type it and say it – I voted for Trump. I didn’t like Harris and didn’t think she would make a good president. And I have read Project 2025 and did not think Trump would implement it, and if he did, just a few rando pieces for the red meat base.

   And boy was I wrong. It started with “it’s just talk” and then moved to “what is he doing” and then moved to “is everyone else this dumb to believe this nonsense”

   So yes you are right. And what makes me mad is a combination of “why do stocks and bonds keep enabling this” and “why won’t someone, anyone, push back even once and see what happens”

   1. “So yes you are right.”

      Of course I am. How could I not be? …..

7. So true, so sad