The man everyone — including his own party leadership — declared unelectable, has been elected. Markets are locked in the predictable swoon. Far from Making America Great Again, the election of Donald J. Trump has catalyzed what has only barely been held in abeyance by extraordinary efforts on the part of the financial elite. That is now over. And now begins — or resumes, rather — the Great Deflation; money will now exit markets faster than it can be printed. Asset prices are crashing. Global financial paralysis is right around the corner.
Or is it?
Already markets are seen recovering, though to the extent that this is short covering versus intervention to prop up markets and project positivity is not yet discernible. To presume that this is the market embracing a Trump presidency organically is laughable.
And, as with Brexit, the largest effect will likely not arrive until Trump starts his new job in January. And even then, the fallout from the institution of his policies will not begin until they actually become live.
The Mexican peso has been decimated, however, and the price of gold has been forced downward through massive dumping in the paper futures market, which is so obviously an interventionist move designed to preserve superficial viability of the U.S. dollar that it’s almost embarrassing.
Of course, this is speculation and opinion. The opacity of the futures market is by design so that the pattern recognition possible in tick by tick stock market instantaneousness is not possible. We are forced, in the same way we discern the existence of black holes by the effect their gravity has on light, to imply their existence through their effect.
But in this, a Trump ascendancy may actually serve the interests of investors. Trump has uniformly decried the corruption and manipulation of markets by central bankers. Could it be that Trump will be the force that actually pushes futures, forwards and derivatives reporting into the same immediate reporting timeframes and granular entity identification as exists in stock markets? It would certainly be a remarkable unexpected boon if that were to happen.
Other potential positives for Canadian investors include the potential surge in demand for real estate. With the Canadian immigration website crashing from reportedly unprecedented traffic, could Trump be the catalyst to reignite Canadian real estate markets after Canadian policies temporarily muted them?
And then there’s oil. Trump says he supports the Keystone XL pipeline. That will certainly cheer the long suffering Albertans who have struggled with landlocked bitumen for years.
Trump victory no surprise
Trump’s election was no Black Swan event, as some would have us believe. As stated in prior missives, this is the expression of an electorate seeking to smash the incumbent American political establishment, which represents its own interests almost exclusively. At least, that is the perception. This man was not elected to govern. He was elected to renovate.
Now that Trump is the president-elect, we get to witness first hand just how much of his unilateralism will be possible in a nation that is uniformly Republican in terms of House and Senate control, but is utterly divided as a party internally. And his electoral power base? Those gun slinging, eye-patch-wearing, armed-to-the-teeth militia types?
They are going to be his biggest headache, if for no other reason that as “their”candidate, he will be held accountable in the most radically literal way. Stray from his promises even minimally, and he’ll find himself surrounded in Washington by camouflaged Oath-Keepers demanding follow-through.
This isn’t the extreme shift in nationalist thinking described by most mainstream media: this is a desperate, visceral response to the decay of the values of equality and freedom, and equitable participation in the power distribution process.
Trump will no more follow through on the majority of his outlandish promises than he will double down on groping women, now that he’s even more famous. What neither he nor the rest of America have quite grasped yet is that he is not elected to rule. He is a placeholder, a metaphor, a symbol only of American discontent.
He is absolutely not presidential material, and the myriad ways in which that has yet to manifest itself are what the future holds beginning in 2017.
The motions to impeach, recall, rescind, and otherwise withdraw power from a man who has made tax evasion a point of national pride have yet to begin. The collapse in markets is merely the first step in what is always the precursor to profound change: rising volatility, and instability across all established systems. Trump’s reign will likely be brief, and catastrophic.
But one thing is certain: the American political landscape has been set afire, and when the fires die down and the smoke begins to clear, there will likely emerge a very different power structure. The Trump victory is not the major shift that it is perceived and described as; it is merely the first manifestation of something much bigger wending its way toward us through the fog of a dark and ominous future.
