Going to the Mattresses
Buy low, sell high. It’s the basic tenet of stock market investing. Usually, during down periods like the one we’re currently experiencing, smart money investors go bargain shopping. When the market as a whole goes down, it takes even high quality, thriving companies with it; which offers a opportunity to pick up quality shares at discounted prices. In a normal time, I’d tell my son (who just started dabbling in the stock market) that the market overreacts to bad news and this is a perfect moment to double-down on companies he believes in. But this is not a normal time. And this is not a normal presidency with the normal stable leadership we’ve come to expect from an American administration. And this, therefore, is not a normal market. At this point, the only investing advice I’d give my son or anyone else is that it might be a good time to go to the mattresses. I don’t mean that in The Godfather sense (although retreating to a hideout and laying low for four years doesn’t sound half bad). I mean it in the sense that the safest place to put your money right now might be under your mattress. At least until they figure out a way to put a tariff on that money, too. The truth is that no one can give you good advice on how to play this market because the situation is so unpredictable. The only sure investment in 2025 is grift. Meanwhile, with a great and stable market merely six weeks in the rearview mirror, we’re getting headlines like these: Stock Rout Picks Up Steam With Recession Warnings Blaring, The Dow plunges 900 points — and the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 are bleeding even worse, and Stocks tank as Trump declines to dismiss recession risk.
+ Trump’s reaction to the 401KO? “You can’t really watch the stock market.” That might sound strange considering the fact that Trump spent much of the Biden era attacking him over the performance of the stock market, starting with a presidential debate in which he explained: “If he’s elected, the stock market will crash.” (I guess it just took a while?)
+ Even crypto, seemingly the surest thing bet of the Trump economy, is sucking wind.
+ And we’re not just talking about the stock market. “President Trump inherited an economy that was, by most conventional measures, firing on all cylinders. Wages, consumer spending and corporate profits were rising. Unemployment was low. The inflation rate, though higher than normal, was falling.” NYT (Gift Article): Trump’s Policies Have Shaken a Once-Solid Economic Outlook.
+ Starving the investor class may not be part of the plan. Starving the government most certainly is. NYT (Gift Article): Stalled Audits and a Skeleton Staff: Inside Trump’s War on the I.R.S.
+ “It was the Gilded Age, a time of rapid population growth and transformation from an agricultural economy toward a sprawling industrial system, when poverty was widespread while barons of phenomenal wealth, like John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, held tremendous sway over politicians who often helped boost their financial empires.” AP with some of the backstory about Trump’s tariffs. Trump loves the Gilded Age and its tariffs. “Experts on the era say Trump is idealizing a time rife with government and business corruption, social turmoil and inequality. They argue he’s also dramatically overestimating the role tariffs played …’The most astonishing thing for historians is that nobody in the Gilded Age economy — except for the very rich — wanted to live in the Gilded Age economy.'”
