Thoughts {11.25.20}

Here's a few things that have been going over recently.  

First a sort of election postmortem.  If Donald Trump had been born with Ronald Reagan's personality  and had coordinated a better Federal response to the pandemic he likely would have won a second term in office.  That, however, was not the President's lot.  I believe the President lost the election after the first debate.  Still, the President received the second most popular vote tally ever recorded in a national election.  That the President lost and the Republicans gained seats in the House of Representatives have a shot of having on to the Senate and did will in state elections tells me that the center in this country still holds.  The political party that figures this out may have an opportunity to build a national coalition that could last for many years.

Keeping to that centrist theme, the picks we're starting to see out of the incoming Biden Administration are more middle of the road choices than I'm sure the progressive wing of the Democratic party would like.  Of course to hear conservatives talk this is going to be the most left leaning Administration we've ever seen, but so far that doesn't seem to be the case.  Hard to look at Janet Yellen as the Treasury Secretary nominee and worry about the ghosts of Lenin following in her footsteps.  

The stock market likes what it's seeing as we've seen a vicious rally since the uncertainty of the election has been pushed aside.  What the market likes most of all is the very positive vaccine talk.  Investors are now contemplating a world that starts to get back to normal, likely by next spring.  That normal won't look exactly like the world we left behind last March, but it will be a place where we'll begin to go about our lives in a less cloistered manner than we've been forced to live under in 2020.  

We are now into the best six month period for stocks and traditionally the period between Thanksgiving and year's end are positive.  Probability suggests that pattern should hold in 2020.  However, I'd caution you that nothing about 2020 has been normal so don't discount the possibility that we've taken most of the rest of this year's gains in the past few weeks.

Finally we get to Thanksgiving.  The myths of the holiday tell us the Pilgrims offered up a feast of Thanksgiving after surviving a harrowing first year in the new world.  A little under half of the people that came over on the Mayflower didn't live to see that celebration and we now know the reason they found the land where they settled so unpopulated was that European diseases had made it there first, possibly smallpox, devastating the tribes that had always lived in the Cape Cod region.  Our modern celebration also has its origins in our Civil War.  I think it's fitting to remember both those things as we celebrate all that has been given to us, give thanks to the medical people and first responders who have been the frontline soldiers in this war and remember those who will be missing from our tables this year.

In that spirit I want to wish each of you a Happy Thanksgiving.  This one I'm sure for most of us will be unlike any we've ever experienced.  Certainly many will not be attending a big family celebration this year, but however you celebrate the holiday I hope that for some period of time your hearts are lighter and the food excellent.  We will have a real Thanksgiving celebration in 2021, I suspect with a better appreciation for what the day means then as well.

God bless and safe travels if you're heading out somewhere.