The Coronavirus and the Real Reason to Be Very, Very Afraid

President Donald Trump has put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of America’s response to the now-pandemic coronavirus problem, and we hope the world’s stock markets will be reassured that at least it’s not presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner running the show. There are new cases of the Chinese-born disease showing up in France and Brazil and here in the United States as well as South Korea and Japan and Italy and Iran, and the disease-fighting sector of the American government has been decimated by budget cuts and staff defections over the past three years, but the Dow Jones only dropped a hundred or so points on Wednesday, so for the moment there’s no real reason to panic.

Trump now argues that the real reason for the six-plus percentage drop in the stock markets this week is all the damn Democrats running for president, and we must admit there might be something to that. The current front-runner in the Democratic race is self-described socialist and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose loony-left policies would probably have a more destructively virulent effect on the stock markets than even the coronavirus, and even the most relatively sane and centrist Democrats still in contention are unlikely to inspire any bull markets.

One of many problems with Trump’s argument, however, is its implicit acknowledgement that the smart money is already hedging its bets that any one of those damn Democrats has a chance of beating him in the next presidential election. They’ll all have plenty of arguments against Trump, including his anti-establishment burn-it-down decimation of the government’s disease-fighting apparatus, which is the kind of bone-headed mistake that even the looniest left of the anti-establishment yet government-loving Democratic party would never make. If this coronavirus problem and its stock market woes continues to Election Day despite the best efforts of Pence, even the damndest of the damn Democrats will have the advantage on the issue.

At this point we’re cautiously hopeful that humankind somehow survives the coronavirus, and that America’s free markets will continue to prosper in a scarily global worldwide economy, and that it all ends for the best, whatever that might be.

— Bud Norman

How Goes the Trade War?

The post-Labor Day stock markets were all down on Tuesday, and the conventional wisdom is that it had something to do with the ongoing global trade war that President Donald Trump has been waging. Trump insists that China is getting the worst of it, and promises the Chinese will soon come begging to sign the most spectacular trade deal America ever made, with the rest of world falling in line shortly afterwards, but for now the smart money doesn’t seem to be betting on it.

China’s economy is indeed taking quite a beating in the trade war, but a downturn in the world’s second largest economy doesn’t bode well for the global economic forecasts, and around the world the markets are jittery about that. Even here in fortress America the bond markets are signaling that the smart money is nervous about the domestic economy’s short term prospects, business investment has been declining, a closely watched index of America’s manufacturing output just fell below 50 percent for the first contraction since 2016, and the smart money around the world will surely fret about that,

America is also taking quite a beating in the trade war, and its consumers are paying higher prices for Chinese goods or American-made products with Chinese parts, no matter what nonsense Trump spews about the Chinese paying all the tariffs, and the farmers and aircraft workers here in Kansas are losing vital markets, and so far it seems a trade war of mutually assured destruction. Trump remains confident it’s all soon leading to the best trade deal ever, with a stock market bonanza sure to follow, but for now both we and the smart money aren’t so sure about it.

Trump still boasts of his close personal friendship with the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, but Xi is a dictator-for-life and Trump is a mere president who has to run for reelection next year, and hopes to run on boasts about the best economy ever, so Xi seems in the stronger negotiating position. Perhaps Trump would have a stronger hand if he were negotiating on behalf of an entire world fed up with China’s undeniably unfair trading policies, but Trump has also chosen to feud about trade with most of the rest of the world, and there’s a reason the smart money isn’t betting on the strategy.

— Bud Norman