Thoughts:10.25.16

Strong performance yesterday in the Nasdaq Composite and the Nasdaq 100 Trust*.

Go read Peggy Noonan over at the Wall Street Journal, "Imagine a Sane Donald Trump."

"Mr. Trump’s great historical role was to reveal to the Republican Party what half of its own base really thinks about the big issues. The party’s leaders didn’t know! They were shocked, so much that they indulged in sheer denial and made believe it wasn’t happening. 

The party’s leaders accept more or less open borders and like big trade deals. Half the base does not! It is longtime GOP doctrine to cut entitlement spending. Half the base doesn’t want to, not right now! Republican leaders have what might be called assertive foreign-policy impulses. When Mr. Trump insulted George W. Bush and nation-building and said he’d opposed the Iraq invasion, the crowds, taking him at his word, cheered. He was, as they say, declaring that he didn’t want to invade the world and invite the world. Not only did half the base cheer him, at least half the remaining half joined in when the primaries ended.

The Republican Party will now begin the long process of redefining itself or continue its long national collapse. This is an epochal event. It happened because Donald Trump intuited where things were and are going."

Yahoo Finance: "America's Biggest Banks Are Closing Hundreds of Branches."  Here's what we said about this back last December when discussing technological deflation:

The term 'technological deflation' is the new economic buzzword.  Its concept is that technological deflation is a good thing {classic economics would disagree} because it improves our standard of living even in a world where wages are stagnant.    You can read about that over here at Business Insider.   The example they use in the article is the iPhone, a device that even though it is expensive replaces the need for several other devices that in aggregate cost more.  I largely agree with the thinking regarding technology but I don't think we've thought about or worked through all of the societal implications from this.  For example two jobs that technology endangers would be bank tellers and your neighborhood mailman.  Cash stations and electronic banking are making costly branch offices for banks obsolete.  Email and, again, electronic banking  has for the most part done away with what a first class letter was supposed to be used for, to pay bills and send personal messages.  Both job classifications have been entry level ways for minorities in this country to enter the middle class.  Nobody seems to have come up with ways to replace the jobs going out with similar ones to take advantage of these gains.  It's hard then to think about technological deflation if a larger and larger percentage of the population can't afford to the products that are becoming cheaper.  

If anything this process is accelerating and we have no better thought out policies to deal with the impact of technological deflation today than we did a year ago. 

Now a bit of a note.  You may have heard that the Chicago Cubs are going to be playing in the World Series and since that's a one and 71 year event we're going to be taking a few days off from posting.  These games go late and I think I'm going to be a bit busier in the morning as I might not start working the rest of the week at my normal 7-7:30  AM time.  So we're going to take the next couple of days off and we'll be back Friday.  Also we'll break in should events warrant.  See you Friday.  Fly the "W"!  Go CUBS!  

*Long ETFs related to the Nasdaq and the Nasdaq 100 in certain client and personal accounts.  Please note these positions can change at any time without notice on this blog or in other printed or electronic media.