Expect stocks to continue their heedless waft into outer space until the election.
They would not likely do so if investors even remotely imagined Kamala Harris might win. James Kunstler provided the most succinct reason we’ve seen for why this is not going to happen: “The people in this land are finally sick of a faceless blob ruling madly from the shadows,” he wrote in the current edition of Clusterfuck Nation. “Mr. Trump has become a national father figure, a titanic offense to a party run by women with daddy issues and to their Marxist allies dogmatically bent on destroying the family (along with every other institution). As it happens, countries need fathers, both actual and symbolic. What a surprise!”
So what about polls that show Harris and Trump neck-and-neck in some swing states? Even ostensibly conservative news outlets such as Fox and the Wall Street Journal have been reporting this as though the data were authentic. My guess is that the editors and news gatherers have all been overwhelmed by the nation’s left-tilting news media into believing polls that have been massaged with poor sampling, misleading questions and misinterpretation. In reality, the believers are like the audience assembled on a barge to witness David Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty disappear. Although some in the audience would swear this happened, it didn’t; the barge had simply been repositioned while a curtain was raised to obscure a large swath of the horizon.
8%-10% More Believable
Although the magician eventually revealed how he did the trick, the New York Times et al. will not be called upon to explain how they levitated Ms. Harris, since she is going to lose by 20 million votes. That’s a realistic number if forecaster Martin Armstrong is right, as he often is about so many other things. He says Harris is actually polling in the 8%-10% range, notwithstanding numbers from Quinnipiac and the Wall Street Journal that have her garnering half the popular vote.
Meanwhile, if stocks have been rallying because they sniff a Trump landslide, investors had better prepare to sell before November 7. We’ve already advised ‘selling the news’ for those who have been gung-ho on stocks in anticipation of Fed easing. That has already begun, and the best conceivable outcome has been priced fourfold into the market. Trump will inherit an economy pumped full of hot air, and the inevitable bust will occur during his watch. No amount of business acumen can prevent this, but it will be better to have a businessman in the White House than a Marxist who will not let the crisis go to waste.
Rick Ackerman