Monday, November 14, 2016

Regarding a President-Elect Trump { An Introduction}

I was traveling last week on business and the events of everything that has unfolded since election day has left me dumbfounded.  Almost the entire political, economic, social media and news punditry got this election wrong.  I will include myself in this group.  I assumed all along that while the election would be close, that Mrs. Clinton would ultimately prevail.  Nearly all of America missed the signs that he could win.  That includes me when I noted this while driving to the World Series in Cleveland:

"If the political sign factor means anything then Mrs. Clinton would be in trouble as I never saw a campaign sign for Hillary along the Indiana/Ohio toll roads.  The good thing for her is there's not a lot of people that live in these rural areas.  My guess is she's going to do well in the Indiana toll road cities of Ft. Wayne & South Bend and the Ohio cities of Toledo & Cleveland.  More than enough votes there to offset the countryside."

That in and of itself is telling and will be commented on at a later date.  However, now that the dust has settled, we as investors need to look at what a Trump Presidency looks like in regards to our investments.  Over the course of the next posts on this blog we are going to do that.  I am less concerned with how Mr. Trump won that what he will do going forward.  These posts are designed to do that.  Today will be the only day that we look back and we shall do so through the lens of a few articles posted by others.  After that we will look at Trump from an economic perspective.  Then I want to talk about what I think Trump Administration will look like regarding social policies.  The third post will deal with foreign affairs.  By-the-way, this to me is the area I think most of us should be concerned with as Trump has no foreign policy experience.  Then I want to look at certain market implications of a Trump Administration.  Finally I'm going to discuss predictive analysis and tie that into portfolio management.  That's a lot to digest and write about while also managing my clients assets so  I'm thinking you can expect something here every two to three days through Thanksgiving. Here are a few comments on how we got to this point with perhaps a pertinent line or two thrown in from each as well:

Wall Street Journal. Peggy Noonan: "What Comes After the Uprising?'.  “We have witnessed something epochal and grave. It is the beginning of a new era whose shape and form are not clear, whose personnel and exact direction are unknown. But something huge and incalculable has occurred. God bless our beloved country.”

The Hoover Institute: "Why Trump Won."  "What was forgotten in all this hysteria was that Trump had brought to the race unique advantages, some of his own making, some from finessing naturally occurring phenomena. His advocacy for fair rather than free trade, his insistence on enforcement of federal immigration law, and promises to bring back jobs to the United States brought back formerly disaffected Reagan Democrats, white working-class union members, and blue-dog Democrats—the “missing Romney voters”—into the party. Because of that, the formidable wall of rich electoral blue states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina crumbled.

Beyond that, even Trump’s admitted crudity was seen by many as evidence of a street-fighting spirit sorely lacking in Republican candidates that had lost too magnanimously in 1992, 2008, and 2016 to vicious Democratic hit machines. Whatever Trump was, he would not lose nobly, but perhaps pull down the rotten walls of the Philistines with him. That Hillary Clinton never got beyond her email scandals, the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation wrongdoing, and the Wikileaks and Guccifer hackings reminded the electorate that whatever Trump was or had done, he at least had not brazenly broken federal law as a public servant, or colluded with the media and the Republican National Committee to undermine the integrity of the primaries and sabotage his Republican rivals.


The Daily Beast; "Seven Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Lost and Donald Trump Won."