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Notes -
The extraordinary US asset pricing bubble has had its long-overdue correction postponed for five years now. We are long past due, and while the market can stay irrational for a very long time, there has never been a permanently high plateau, to borrow a fateful phrase.
It was therefore likely that whoever won in 2024 was going to be president during a big repricing and associated severe recession (which may well be postponed further, but which I’m confident will happen before 2029 - though I have been wrong before). The question is whether Trump might be worth it.
What kind of Democratic Party will win in 2028? Gavin himself is a blank vessel with no real beliefs. But it is possible - in my view, likely - that Trump might cause the Democratic Party to profoundly rethink policy on a number of fronts in a way that makes a future Dem administration more amenable than a hypothetical Hillary / Harris / Biden II admin, especially on social policy.
I…wouldn’t bet on it.
I’ve written about how my 2012 self thought the GOP would handle Obama’s reelection. Could he have caused the Republicans to rethink policy? Maybe sideline the social conservatives in favor of the Tea Partiers?
When stressed, establishment Republicans lost ground to their upstart populist wing. What would that look like for Democrats? The blue-collar base is either hollowed out or firmly aboard the Trump Train. White-collar workers want the kind of safety net that makes free college look like a bargain. I don’t know what left-populists could do other than throw helicopter money.
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There is a pretty straight line between the tariffs and the markets' reassessment of near term, and long term, growth prospects. The AI stuff feels like a bubble to me, but the reason things keep going down is that it keepa looking like the Trump administration is actually going to follow through on the tariff thing. I don't know what delusion they are operating under that they think it will work out long term; this is spectacularly ill-conceived and badly executed policy.
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