Re: ^^^^^^The Trump cult in a nutshell***

Our portfolio's lost 3 percent of its value since Trump.

A1ASauce® · 2025-04-14T11:28:01.122Z

I figured if I'm gonna find something to complain about with Trump, I may as well put my money where my mouth is and check my portfolio. I don't know much about the stock market, but I think a 3-percent loss is survivable. Anyone who lived thru 2008 can attest that it could be a lot worse. Or maybe: A) It is as bad as MSNBC says it is ... but it's just that our (my wife and me) portfolio is impervious to the "economic nuclear winter" Trump has ushered in? B) It just hasn't hit yet and we're all gonna die? C) It's just that the mainstream/legacy media cannot be trusted to report on much of anything with any balance or thoughtfulness? I'm going with C.

quozzel

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Apr 14, 2025, 11:10 AM

Even if you don't buy into the climate crisis - and I absolutely do, and I know enough of the science that it scares the bejesus outta me - there's a ton of other stuff building.

There's two things in particular coming to a head - first and probably foremost: there's a demographic crisis sweeping across the industrialized and even developing world. Folks who are concerned about the border crisis, for instance, haven't much noticed that the immigrants now coming across the border are no longer Mexican, they're from the Triangle - El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras. Mexico no longer has the surplus young people to be sending them across the border to hope for the best. In 10-15 years the Triangle won't either...and the flood will turn into a trickle and then stop altogether. That's just simple math.

The human race collectively figured out way too late for a whole lot of countries - China foremost among them, but also including South Korea, Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, and several Eastern European countries - that as people moved to cities they started having far fewer kids...and that was a big deal. But kids are expensive and women in cities work and don't have enough kids to maintain the population. Fortunately the US is in better shape - we actually had a huge boom in the "Baby Boomer" generation, Europe had bombed itself back to the Stone Age and was rebuilding and so didn't - and we're going to get to learn from the bad examples of most of the rest of the first and second worlds. We're going to have to incentivize women in both rural and urban areas to have more children...and frankly, as Europe falls apart, we're going to be getting a flood of young people from Europe looking for a future, which will also help.

The other problem is that the US-built "Bretton Woods System" - globalization - is falling apart. The US can't afford it and we have no incentive to continue to enforce it. With Trump or without, the US was pulling back from its old alliances and many of its old trading partners...though we can't make do without Canada, Mexico, Australia/New Zealand, Japan and Taiwan. America in 1950 could build everything we needed in country. Tech and the supply chain is so vastly more complex these days no one country, not even us, is remotely capable of building it all. We need metals, crude, and timber from Canada, we need cheap productive labor and the short supply lines Mexico gives us, we need Australia's lithium and cobalt and other raw materials it's both dirty and expensive to produce here because we don't have a big empty desert like Australia does - and we need Japan and Taiwan's tech sectors. And frankly I'm rooting for the Cantonese triad of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Macao to make it as China collapses because they will help a lot. BYD's electric cars would be a massive boon - I mean, $10K electric cars that you just plug up and drive away in five minutes, really? Be an awesome deal and would shake up the whole industry if the CCP wasn't benefitting from it...but those factories are in the Cantonese region and could well outlast the CCP. Places like India and Vietnam are going to lead the world in stuff like jeans, T-shirts, and underwear...and they're welcome to it. Those are not good jobs, and those are not good value-added industries. At some point in the not-so-distant future that stuff will pour out of automated factories anywhere in the US or our trading sphere.

So we're headed for a major re-alignment. And those are always turbulent and never comfortable.

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Or you're just plain lucky.

The Dow peaked at 45,014 on December 4th, 2024...and then started getting really wobbly as Trump Uncertainty arrived in the market. It fluctuated around for awhile, briefly recovering to within a hair of that on February 5th of this year as Trump deferred tariffs on Mexico and Canada...and then began a steady drop that turned into a plunge when Donny the Tariff Man started seemingly throwing random darts at a map. At one point a few days back it was all the way down to 36,611...which, incidentally, is 19% down, not 3%. It's jumped around the last couple days and closed at 40,212 on Friday...which is better but still 11% down.

This week is where the rubber hits the road. If Donald stabilizes his constant disruptions and shows a coherent policy, we could see it start to recover. If it starts going the other way, well...cue that line from Speed where one guy goes: "Is there anything that can keep this elevator from falling?". To which Keanu Reaves answered: "Yeah...the basement."

I'll leave it to you to decide what's more likely.

Our portfolio's lost 3 percent of its value since Trump.

D) It aint ove. Could drown or just tread water***

Or

Re: Or

No Plan __ No Telling.***

Agreed. And I'll add that it can be both C and D at the same time.

Re: Our portfolio's lost 3 percent of its value since Trump.

^^^^^^The Trump cult in a nutshell***