In Search of the Perfect Investment

A third of Americas are furious.

They have lost jobs to China and Mexico. Those with jobs have seen their real salaries go nowhere in 20 years. Their healthcare is bad, unaffordable and becoming more unaffordable. Obamacare prices are skyrocketing.

Washington is gridlocked. Nothing gets done. Nothing gets fixed. Our politicians are crooked and corrupt.

Hillary Clinton is more of the same. She will continue the policies seen by many as failing, or certainly not benefiting those one-third — maybe it’s higher.

Donald Trump doesn’t come from Washington. He lies about everything. We know he cheats his workers. We know he’s a racist, a bigot, a sexual assaulter. We know he doesn’t pay taxes, etc. etc.

But we don’t care.

He’s new and fresh. And his ideas are different.

The old way hasn’t worked.

So, let’s throw a Molotov Cocktail in Washington, blow it up and start from scratch.

What do we have to lose?

That’s the “logic” out there in the hinterlands. There’s no idea of what happens next.

So, let’s look at what might happen next:

Donald is elected. Stockmarkets crater 20% Day One. That’s next Wednesday. The dollar drops 3% to 5%, as many overseas investors remember Trump’s talk that he will negotiate the repayment of U.S. debt. To many investors overseas, this means the U.S. government no longer stands 100% behind its treasuries. That will freak everyone and their uncle out. That will mean a frenzied selling of treasuries, with a precipitous decline in bond prices and a leap in interest rates.

We’re now eyeing a financial crisis akin to 2008, perhaps worse.

Markets work on stability and confidence. What Trump proposes in his “Contract with the American Voter” throws a serious spanner into “stability and confidence,” e.g. Says Donald:

+ I will announce my intention to renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from the deal under Article 2205

+ I will direct my Secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator

+ I will direct the Secretary of Commerce and U.S. Trade Representative to identify all foreign trading abuses that unfairly impact American workers and direct them to use every tool under American and international law to end those abuses immediately

+ I will begin removing the more than 2 million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back

+ I will suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur. All vetting of people coming into our country will be considered extreme vetting.

He’s shooting from the hip. He makes decisions on things he knows nothing about — which is basically everything. This is fearful to our overseas trading partners and our overseas investors (like the Chinese), who hold a big percentage of our treasuries. It’s Goodbye Dollar as a world currency. It’s a Black Swan event.

As he messes up, as the world moves into financial crises, there will be talk of impeaching Trump. In fact, maybe that’s the strategy of the Republican Establishment?  Elect Donald, expose Russian ties or fraud conviction for Trump University, or proof of sexual assault or … so many ways.  Then impeach him.  He wouldn’t stand a chance with Republicans and Democrats against him.  The Republican establishment gets what they want, Pence.

Hillary is elected. Stockmarkets bounce back. As the polls have looked recently increasingly bad for Hillary, stockmarkets have performed awfully. Yesterday, the benchmark index (the S&P 500) closed at its lowest level since July as it fell for the eighth consecutive session, something it hasn’t done since the depths of the 2008 financial crisis.

Here’s the S&P over the last ten days:

It won’t be politics “as usual,” however. It will be much worse. The Republicans will block everything. They’ve said as much. They will focus on impeaching her for her various “crimes” of corruption, “pay for play,” etc. etc.

The focus will be not be on governing, it will be on impeachment — of both Hillary and Donald.

Perhaps that’s the unwritten “strategy?”

Their VPs will make better Presidents: Mike Pence or Tim Kaine.

Wait, there’s more. What happens if, say, Hillary’s election is close? Then the Republicans will throw every legal challenge they can create to contest the election. Suggestions of riggings, etc.

Is this what we’re facing in the next few months? Maybe years?

Not a pretty picture.

Friends have already gone to 100% cash.

A few days ago Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote a piece arguing against Trump:

Donald Trump Voters, Just Hear Me Out by Thomas L. Friedman

This is my last column until after the election, so I’d like to address the people least likely to read it: Donald Trump voters. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky and a few of them will buy fish wrapped in this column, and they’ll accidentally peruse it! Desperate times call for desperate measures.

While I’ve opposed the Trump candidacy from the start, I’ve never disparaged Trump voters. Some are friends and neighbors; they’re all fellow Americans. We should take their concerns seriously. But we should also demand that they be serious, that they draw distinctions between these two presidential candidates.

Yes, Hillary Clinton is a flawed leader – but in the way so many presidents were. We know her flaws: She has a weakness for secrecy, occasionally fudges truths, has fawning aides and a husband who lacks discipline when it comes to moneymaking and women. But she is not indecent, and that is an important distinction. And she’s studious, has sought out people of substance on every issue and has taken the job of running for president seriously.

Trump is not only a flawed politician, he’s an indecent human being. He’s boasted of assaulting women – prompting 11 to come forward to testify that he did just that to them; his defense is that he could not have assaulted these women because they weren’t pretty enough.

He’s created a university that was charged with defrauding its students. He’s been charged with discriminating against racial minorities in his rental properties. He’s stiffed countless vendors, from piano sellers to major contractors. He’s refused to disclose his tax returns because they likely reveal that he’s paid no federal taxes for years, is in bed with dodgy financiers and doesn’t give like he says to charity.

He’s compared the sacrifice of parents of a soldier killed in Iraq to his “sacrifice” of building tall buildings. He’s vowed, if elected, to prosecute his campaign rival.

We have never seen such behaviors in a presidential candidate.

At the same time, Trump has shown no ability to talk about any policy issue with any depth. Harlan Coben’s debate-night tweet last month had it right: “On Aleppo he sounds like a fifth grader giving a book report on a book he never read.”

I understand why many Trump supporters have lost faith in Washington and want to just “shake things up.” When you shake things up with a studied plan and a clear idea of where you want to get to, you can open new futures. But when you shake things up, guided by one-liners and no moral compass, you can cause enormous instability and systemic vertigo.

But there is an even more important reason Trump supporters, particularly less-educated white males, should be wary of his bluster: His policies won’t help them. Trump promises to bring their jobs back. But most of their jobs didn’t go to a Mexican. They went to a microchip.

The idea that large numbers of manual factory jobs can be returned to America if we put up a wall with Mexico or renegotiate our trade deals is a fantasy. Trump ignores the fact that manufacturing is still by far the largest sector of the U.S. economy. Indeed, our factories now produce twice what they did in 1984 – but with one-third fewer workers.

Trump can’t change that. Machines and software will keep devouring, and spawning, more work of all kinds. Did you hear that IBM’s cognitive computer, Watson, helped to create a pop song, “Not Easy,” with the Grammy-winning producer Alex da Kid? The song was released on Oct. 21, IBM noted, and within 48 hours it climbed to No. 4 on iTunes’s Hot Tracks.

No one knows for certain how we deal with this new race with and against machines, but I can assure you it’s not Trump’s way – build walls, restrict trade, give huge tax cuts to the rich. The best jobs in the future are going to be what I call “STEMpathy jobs – jobs that blend STEM skills (science, technology, engineering, math) with human empathy. We don’t know what many of them will look like yet.

The smartest thing we can do now is to keep our economy as open and flexible as possible – to get the change signals first and be able to quickly adapt; create the opportunity for every American to engage in lifelong learning, because whatever jobs emerge will require more knowledge; make sure that learning stresses as much of the humanities and human interactive skills as hard sciences; make sure we have an immigration policy that continues to attract the world’s most imaginative risk-takers; and strengthen our safety nets, because this era will leave more people behind.

This is the only true path to American greatness in the 21st century. Trump wants to make America great in ways that are just not available anymore. “What do we have to lose” by trying his way? Trump asks. The answer is: everything that actually makes us great. When the world gets this fast, small errors in navigation have huge consequences.

While Clinton has failed to inspire, her instincts and ideas will keep us hewing to basically the right course. And however great her flaws, she is still in the zone of human decency. Trump is not.

We can never be great as a country with a president with the warped values of Donald Trump. I pray that in the end at least some Trump voters, my fellow Americans, will see that.

Last Sunday, Gary Kasparov wrote a piece:

I know a Rigged Election. This isn’t One.

For the last few weeks, the Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump, has been talking a lot about how the Nov. 8 election is rigged against him. In fact, he sounds convinced that the entire campaign season is rigged in favor of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. These are serious charges, or they would be if Mr. Trump had any idea what he was talking about.

Nobody in the American political establishment is happy about Mr. Trump’s wild-eyed accusations of voter fraud and media conspiracies because they understand that it undermines their own credibility as leaders in a democracy. This is exactly why my country’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin, is so delighted by Mr. Trump’s charges.

In power for 16 years now, Mr. Putin and his global propaganda machine aggressively promote the idea that democracy is a chaotic mess that only the hero Putin can save Russia from falling into. Social media is flooded by Kremlin-funded trolls ranting about the illegitimacy of the American election process and warning of the potential for violence. To have a major party nominee in America repeating this propaganda is beyond Mr. Putin’s wildest dreams. Mr. Trump even echoes Mr. Putin’s authoritarian rationales, presenting himself as the only one who can rescue America.

I know a few things about rigged elections. I know what it’s like to have the overwhelming power of the state used against me to make a mockery of the democratic process. I know what it means to have my opinion censored while every major media outlet is dedicated to vilifying me and my colleagues. I know what happens when a conspiracy of public and private interests forms to intimidate, harass, prosecute and even kill in order to preserve a monopoly on power.

I know these things well because I learned them the hard way during my years as a political opposition leader in Mr. Putin’s Russia. None of these things are happening to Donald Trump.

After I retired from professional chess in 2005, I helped form an opposition coalition, known as Other Russia, to protest Mr. Putin’s increasingly dictatorial regime. According to the Russian Constitution, Mr. Putin was unable to stand for a second re-election as president in 2008, and it wasn’t clear what would happen to a power structure that had become completely centered on one man. If Mr. Putin ignored the Constitution completely and simply stayed on openly as a dictator, he risked alienating the Group of 8 world leaders who had agreed to pretend he was a fellow democrat.

The Other Russia opposition coalition had live debates, policy papers, platforms – all the things that were absent from the official elections, where the only thing that mattered was who had the Kremlin’s blessing. Rather to my surprise, in 2007 I was the winner of the national primary to choose the coalition’s presidential candidate.

Once I had been selected in a real election that wasn’t official, it was time for me to participate in an official election that was completely fake.

In order to do this, I had to jump through the official and unofficial hoops that had been put in place to prevent unapproved candidates from making it onto a ballot. Two million signatures were needed from all over the country in just one month, a task made even more herculean by the sheer size of Russia. A nominating congress had to be held, an apparently simple chore that became impossible when no hotel would rent a suitable space to us. Even American-owned hotel chains mysteriously canceled our reservations.

While I traveled across the country to campaign, we would find venues suddenly closed for repairs, our flights canceled, our meetings shut down by the police. Nor did I quite manage to stay out of jail, spending five days in a Moscow cell for participating in an “unauthorized rally.”

Rigging an election isn’t only a matter of stuffing ballot boxes. It is not even that “the people who cast the votes don’t decide an election, the people who count the votes do,” as the apocryphal quote attributed to Joseph Stalin has it. By the time the voting begins, the game is already over. Anyone who opposes the regime – from peaceful street protesters to the wealthiest man in the country – is targeted. The Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky spent a decade in prison for daring to support political groups outside of Mr. Putin’s control.

The fraud that does occur on Election Day is more about showing loyalty and getting the numbers just right to keep up appearances. Busloads of official voters go from polling station to polling station in a tradition we even have a name for: a “carousel.” Sheaves of ballots are dumped into urns while polling officials stand in the way to block the view. Sometimes, the excessive zeal of apparatchiks produces returns of more than 100 percent, as happens regularly in Russian regions like Chechnya.

To this day, I do not like the title “former Russian presidential candidate” because I knew at the start that my name would never appear on a ballot. The former prime minister Mikhail M. Kasyanov was allowed to progress one step further in his own independent run in 2008 – before being disqualified two months later.

The only candidates allowed to run in the presidential election against Mr. Putin’s handpicked successor, the former prime minister Dmitri A. Medvedev, were the same token Communist and the same token nationalist who had been running in every election since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Medvedev got 71.2 percent, a tactful few tenths of a percentage point less than Mr. Putin received in 2004. Four years later, Mr. Medvedev again switched desks with Mr. Putin, who hadn’t left power for a second regardless of his official title of prime minister. President Obama called Mr. Putin to congratulate him on his election victory, once again, as president.

This is the modern dictatorship, savvy at using the free world’s terms and technology for its own ends. And when fake elections at home aren’t enough, an aggressive campaign of intimidation and disinformation abroad can be very useful. The Russian news leads every day with Mr. Trump and WikiLeaks and how they are supposedly exposing the corrupt reality of American democracy. Mr. Putin can no longer pretend to be a democratic leader, so his goal is to drag everyone else down to his level – and he is doing it with Mr. Trump’s help.

A democracy is as strong as its people believe it to be. It cannot be destroyed from the outside, only from within.

Harry Newton, who apologizes for the length of today’s column. It’s weekend reading and thinking. The stockmarket is down again this morning — the ninth straight day. This does not look good. Fortunately — for now — the economy is still adding jobs.