Category Archives: Wall St.
Trump’s Animal Spirits
James Fallows, in the October Atlantic, says Jane Goodall told him that Donald Trump reminds her of a chimp:
In many ways the performances of Donald Trump remind me of male chimpanzees and their dominance rituals,” Jane Goodall, the anthropologist, told me shortly before Trump won the GOP nomination. “In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks. The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position.”
Animal Spirits
The elite made a monkey of Trump before the election. But since then he’s released the stock market’s animal spirits. Oil and the dollar dig The Donald too.
Many 401-k investors are bullish because stocks have hit record highs. But Clinton Foundation investors – not so much.
Well, at least one Clinton supporter has done ok. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is up 8% since the election.
Tesla Autopilot Crashes
I got to drive a Tesla once. It was cool. Like driving one of the HO slot cars I had as a kid.
But I think I’d be queasy about letting the car drive itself. There are those who say it’s a great innovation. Like speed control on steroids. But the car can kill.
Tesla Autopilot Crashes
The WSJ reports Tesla is being investigated by the SEC for not informing shareholders of a fatal crash involving its autopilot system.
Update:
Daily Beast says Tesla is misleading about autopilot safety. If you don’t brake it’s your fault because your weren’t paying attention. If you do brake it’s your fault because you were driving.
Holman Jenkins says the autopilot feature has been around since 1995. It’s basically cruise control and the driver still has to pay attention.
British Independence Day
It’s to the the “back of the queue” for the U.K., if President Obama is to be believed. The Brits ignored him and other experts and decided they’d had enough of the bureaucrats in Brussels.
EU commissions regulate everything from the bend of bananas to the curvature of cucumbers.
British Independence Day
Gerard Baker discussed Brexit in a WSJ front page analysis, Britain Fires a Shot Heard Round the World. He compared it to the populist movement that gave the Republican Party The Donald as presumptive nominee for president of the United States.
Tea Party Nation, a leading umbrella group, congratulated the British on their “Independence Day” and said in a statement “the land that gave us Magna Carta decided they wanted freedom and not a socialist dictatorship.”
Megan McArdle in Bloomberg had this to say about global elites and populist movements:
In many ways, members of the global professional class have started to identify more with each other than they have with the fellow residents of their own countries. Witness the emotional meltdown many American journalists have been having over Brexit.
Journalists aren’t the only one’s melting down over Brexit. The Dow and the British Pound celebrated “the freedom from socialist dictatorship” by plunging 600 points and 11% respectively.
Business Boat People
Business boat people are fleeing America for lower tax countries. President Obama ordered another change in the law to make them stay put. The U.S. has one of the world’s highest corporate tax rates.
Democrat Establishment Melt Down
The Democrat establishment is worried about a Clinton campaign melt down.
Hillary says, “no worries.” She’s not the establishment. She’s “a woman running to be the first woman president.” Then, again, Bernie Sanders is a Jew running to be the first Jewish president.
The first woman lost New Hampshire to the first Jewish Democratic Socialist by 22 points.
Hillary wasn’t even the first woman to be Secretary of State. Madeleine Albright was.
Democrat Establishment
Albright says, “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help women.” Evidently, that’s where you’ll find millennial women these days. They’re voting like crazy for Sanders. That’s because “that’s where the boys are,” according to Gloria Steinem. Kathleen Parker says there’s a more likely explanation:
…young liberal women, like their male counterparts, are attracted to the cool old guy because he’s promising a dream in which the rich have less and the poor have more. Robin Hood is so awesome.
Maureen Dowd thinks Hillary “is establishment enough.” Her sense of entitlement is her problem:
She has long been driven by a fear of being “dead broke,” as she put it — and a conviction that she deserved the life and perks she would have had if she had gone into the private sector. That led her to do her suspiciously lucrative commodity trades while Bill was Arkansas attorney general and to make Wall Street speeches on the cusp of her 2016 campaign, even though she and Bill had already made more than $139 million between 2007 and 2014.
Dowd says “Hillary isn’t likable enough for the young women who were supposed to carry her forward as a Joan of Arc.” At least not compared to “chick magnet” Bernie Sanders.
