All things considered, it has only been about 3 months since Trump took office, I feel like there is absolutely no way that this was just a single craze and from here things will even out.
I feel like until 2028 (or maybe 2026?) S&P 500 is going to look like a roller coaster.
What do you think?
What climb? Its still down 8.61% since he took office. Crazy to celebrate losing almost 9%.
By contrast Biden’s second to last year was UP 24.23%. His last year was up yet another 23.31%.
To put dollars on this:
- If under Biden you’d put $100,000 into the S&P500 on Jan 2023 on Dec 31 2023 you’d have $124,230.
- If still under Biden you left your $124,230 in the S&P500 on Dec 31 2024 you’d have $153,188.01.
- Under trump if you’d put $100,000 into the S&P500 on Jan 2025 by today Apr 13th 2023 you’d have $91,390
I see no cause for celebration here.
What Trump is doing now will almost certainly outlast his presidency. One man, just one, has completely betrayed all of the trading relationships this country built over the course of a century, and even better, he did it unconstitutionally and Congress went along with it for their own enrichment, both Democrat and Republican.
Supply lines will be recalibrated. Our foreign partners will make new relationships with more dependable trading partners. (ie, China.) Over the course of the next decade or two, the utter stupidity of what Trump has done will play out to full effect. A few hundred Americans who shoved their heads up Trump’s ass will get richer, but long-term, this is going to hurt most Americans.
If you’re not diversifying your investments geographically you’re no longer diversified at all.
Most shitty things in our life can be traced to Reagan. Trump is going to outdo that legacy by so much.
We’d need an actual left wing president to actually undo the damage, and there’s no way the corporate democratic party is going to allow that
You’re right.
We needed a Bernie, and Democrats happily subverted their own primary process to prevent it. Now, all you can do is take whatever measures possible you can to ensure your own survival.
Bernie might have helped but even if he got into office Congress would have stopped nearly everything he campaigned on.
The administrative state would not have been torn up but that’s just tinkering around the edges. Things like IRS free file expansion or banking at the post office.
The supreme Court would belong to Democrats but…tinkering around the edges.
If Bernie got re-elected (no guarantee, his first term would have ended in COVID and broken promises, probably impeachment by a Republican house). 2024 would 100% have gone to a Republican.
We don’t need Bernie now. His plans are mostly just a harder crank on the ratchet. Good, but insufficient. We need Allende. Someone that wants to build non-mariet solutions to make our lives better, and a movement behind them in Congress.
I hope people realize that trump was able to do all this because of years of bad law writing and eroding of the balance of powers. All that concentrated power is great until someone you disagree with sits in the throne you built. It would be nice if after trump, we learn our lesson and vastly shrink the power of the office. Unfortunately , I believe it is likely people won’t realize this and will put even more effort into strengthening the power of that throne after trump is gone, in an effort to more quickly undo his work, which of course means someone will be able to redo the damage even faster at a later time.
Biden had the chance to do it and outright refused to place more restrictions on the executive.
I’m not a both-sides’er, but one thing that both parties will absolutely never do is limit their own power, even if it means limiting their opponents simultaneously.
The President and his cabinet are, as we speak, violating the constitution. The Senate is complicit. The House of Representatives is complicit. The Supreme Court is complicit. We are past the point where voting for either Democrat or Republican can meaningfully change anything. We can’t vote to stop the assfucking that we’re getting, we just get to vote for who gets to be on top while it happens. This downward spiral will continue until a revolution occurs or by some miracle a majority of Americans wake up and start voting for new political parties in numbers that could threaten to topple both establishment parties away and implement sweeping government reforms with a strong mandate. Obviously, the way things are going, revolution is far more likely.
Hi friend. There are a ton of options. Many invest in funds VT and VXUS, international funds run by Vanguard. SPDR is also a popular choice.
Take a week and just spend 30-60 minutes a day reading up on the various options in the global arena and make the best decision for yourself. The funds I mentioned above are a good starting point for doing your research and finding an option that fits your goals.
I’m not an expert, but I’m an index fund/mutual fund guy. I’m not looking for a lottery ticket, I just want to keep up with the market.
They’re basically the new savings account, right? If they don’t do well, chances are nothing really is, so your money is stagnating to the same degree as everyone else. No real loss.
If a Democratic president is able to take office following the fuckery happening to basic voting rights, I fully expect the cycle to continue of the Democratic president being blamed for inflation/recession due to transferring wealth to people who don’t need to spend money from those who do (thanks, tariffs) in the first part of their term. Any economic gains at the end of their tenure will be conveniently ignored.
My next vote goes to:
Sweet Meteor of Death 2028
Trump will not make it past the mid-terms. Vance, who is the main mover-shaker behind the 2025 manifesto, will make sure the Senate impeaches Trump for treason, and the fact that under the Constitution he can NOT be President - an then Vance will assume the Presidency. If you think Trump is far-right, wait until Vance takes over. And since Vance was not ELECTED President, he can serve another two full terms - 10 years total. At the end of the ten years, The top 20% income earners - some 70 million Americans - will be living in luxury while the 0ther 80% will be nothing more than indentured servants. The Handmaidens Tale will be mild in comparison.
It could happen, but I think you’re wrong.
Trump is going to live to be 100 years old, like Kissinger did. The problem with your theory is that, after his first term, people know full well that he can’t be controlled.
Vance does not think so. Fact is, Trump is far too EASY to control by those around him. Even Putin knows how to manipulate him.
More likely they 25th him for his very obvious sundowning. Trying him for treason would be too likely to hurt them politically
Vance is in no way worried about what will hurt the Republican party politically. They let that concept lapse when they chose Trump as the candidate. By all previous political reasoning, Trump should have been a disaster politically, but that did not stop them.
The fact that the Supreme Court has already acknowledged that Trump should be disqualified from being President under the constitution for Treasonous actvity feeds right into their hands.
The tariffs alone would be enough to cause a recession. It’s not just that they’re large (even 10% is large by modern standards) it’s mostly that they’re so chaotic. I’ve read that most businesses are avoiding hiring, avoiding any expenditures they can, and just waiting to see what happens. Seeing what happens means keeping cash on hand, which means a drop in GDP. The numbers might have been juiced a bit by people making big orders and trying to get them done before the tariffs come into full effect, but once that’s done the pain is going to be much more visible.
In addition to the tariffs, there’s the firing of federal workers. There are about 3 million in the US, and even if only a fraction have been fired so far, I would bet the rest are cutting back on unnecessary expenses and building up a cash reserve in case they get canned. This will ripple through the economy too.
And then there’s the ICE stuff. People with green cards getting deported for exercising their first amendment rights, scientists being refused entry for a post they made on social media in their home countries, Canadian, German and British people being thrown in an ICE detention facility because of a minor paperwork mix-up. This is going to make tourists and business visitors much less willing to take a chance and visit the US, but this won’t hit until later. Big tourist season is the summer, and so the lack of business won’t show up yet. And some conferences were too close to cancel, but conferences for later in the year might be moved or cancelled.
And there’s the invasion threats against Canada and Greenland, and the tariff wars against Canada and Mexico, and the refusal to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia. The biggest visitors to the US were Canadians, Mexicans and Europeans, and all of them are going to be avoiding the country now. And, not just avoiding the country. People are trying to avoid buying US goods and services.
In addition, there are treasuries. Many are held by Japan and China. Even just acting purely rationally, they see the chaos in the US and know the US might not be able to pay its bills, or it might choose not to pay them. The risk has gone up. If they aren’t being purely rational and self-interested, they also know that they can hurt the US by dumping treasuries, so they’re doing that.
And then there are the scientists leaving the US, or choosing not to come. And there are potential international students who see how risky it is for anybody who isn’t white, male and christian. This sort of thing might take decades, but it’s going to hurt the US the most. So many of the world’s most talented people have come to the US and started businesses, but that is definitely going to slow down now.
Even if Trump were impeached and removed, and all his changes were undone with apologies, there has been some permanent damage done to the US by the MAGA majority. But, since it is a majority, since the MAGAs control the supreme court, the senate, the house and the presidency, there’s going to be a lot more damage done before there’s even a hint of a stabilization, let alone a recovery.
I think any rational investor is going to get their money out of the US, and the slight recovery the S&P 500 has seen in the last week is going to be dwarfed by the crash over the next few years.
I was so focused on the tarrifs this week that I forgot about the actual fucking threats of war against close allies 🤦
I agree with most of this. However I think there are additional elements that make prediction challenging.
First, if the US undergoes any kind of revolution in the next five years, the cultural effects you mentioned could by overwritten by more recent events. I realize this sounds improbable, but the transition from the New Deal era to global neolibralism was a revolution. “The Reagan Revolution” was an actual economic and social revolution. And we’re overdue for another.
Second, both the markets and the real economy were in an unsustainable condition before Trump. The pursuit of endless growth, the disruption of climate breakdown, the end of the US’ monopolar hegemony, and the return of extreme wealth inequality in the US made the status quo impossible to simply maintain. Big changes were coming even without Trump.
I maintain some optimism. I think anti trust regulation, climate-based financial regulation, and an embrace of market socialism could render the last three months to be the last gasps of the old order instead of another point in what has been a decline decades in the making. But it depends what happens next.
Unfortunately, revolutions are frequently bloody. I think Europe’s more gradual change post WWII has meant the future is arriving more smoothly there, with less disruption.
I suspect that if the US survives, people will look at 1950-2025 as a kind of golden age, despite all the societal problems. The US really had things easy. It was virtually the only advanced economy to come out of WWII intact. Every other country had to rebuild. For the first 20ish years, regulations from the Great Depression lingered, so unions were strong and taxes were high. All of that meant that you had families where a plumber could buy a house for a family with 4 kids even if his wife didn’t work.
Since the 70s, a lot of worker protections have vanished. High taxes on the ultra-rich have disappeared. But, the US has still had the benefit of having the Reserve Currency of the world. That has allowed the US to easily run big deficits, which has allowed growth that other countries couldn’t match.
I get the impression that the time of the US dollar being the world’s reserve currency are coming to an end. In addition, US companies and universities have been places that the best and the brightest wanted to go. That also seems to be coming to an end.
So, when the dust settles, if the US does manage to transition to a more socialist country with a better safety net, it’s still going to be rough for people. They’re used to 75 years of having benefits that most countries don’t get. Probably a better social safety net and a greater equality in wealth will make up for that. But, it could be that people who were alive at this time will look back at a time when the US was the hub of the world and miss that.
I get the sentiment, but I think it’s possible we might miss the benefits you’re describing less than you think.
For the average American, the biggest manifestation of what you’re describing was cheap electronics, trucks, and suburban developments. These kinds of benefits are a poor salve for the alienation and atomization that now besets us. We have been trained to try and fill the holes in our lives with crap while losing more and more of the time and security that affords actual contentedness.
I think a generation raised knowing and trusting their neighbors, able to walk to school and bike to work and possibly go home for lunch, where they can eat some veggies grown in a community garden on an apartment roof might not feel like they’ve lost all that much just because they can’t buy an exercise machine they never use for $99 at a Black Friday sale.
There’s a reason a lot of “poorer” countries greatly outpace is in satisfaction and quality of life surveys.
I completely agree with you. The real shit show hasn’t even started. The waves from the tsunami will take a while to hit.
