Don’t Trust the “Trump Boom”
Call me a bad conservative.
I don’t cheer this past year’s stock market gains. I don’t enthusiastically crow and pump my fist every time the Standard and Poor’s breaks a new record. I don’t breathlessly watch CNBC to see the day’s gains, listening mindlessly to commentators in custom-tailored suits with shiny gelled hair pontificating about what a rise in the futures market of Chinese copper means.
Oh, sure, the few times I check my 401k balance, I’m pleased. But when the closing bell rings and the champagne corks pop and the Financial District bursts into song and dance, I’m more or less indifferent–perhaps less. Perhaps I’m even pessimistic.
It’s because we’ve seen this movie more than a few times before. The wildcat banking of the mid-19th century, the frequent panics of the fin-de-siècle, the Roaring Twenties, Jimmy Carter’s cardigan-covered stagflation, Alan Greenspan’s handiwork in suppressing interest rates to fuel a housing bubble that popped in the fateful autumn of 2008–we live in a cinema where the feature show is never different. America, its economy and its workers, its labor and capital, are stuck in an involuntary pas de deux with some guy named Dow Jones.
The so-called “Trump boom” that’s sending stocks ever skyward was suspect from the beginning, but not for anything the President’s done. Trump’s tax-cut act, his most significant economic policy so far, has no doubt loosened some restriction on the market, freeing up money that would otherwise float down the river of Acheron into D.C.’s dead coffers. That’s certainly been a boon to traders whose job consists of playing god with other people’s dreams of retirement.
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