So What have we Learned ?

One of my favorite actors and comedians, John C. Riley, occasionally in the past portrayed a Dr, Steven Brule, an academic kind of character who went into great depth in explaining some kind of phenomena in great detail, and then would close with the question, “so what have we learned?”.

The Health of the President

The Trump era will provide historians a lot of interesting material on strange things that went well and not so well. At the moment it would appear to me that how the President does over the next 10 days is probably the most important short term market factor. Based on what I read and hear, the steroid part of the drug cocktail is probably having the most effect in this early stage. The effect of the “Regen drug” will then need to be seen going forward. I find it interesting the the stock REGN is not making new highs, it has bounced some, currently trading at 604, kind of in the middle of the range of the past six months, high at 664 on July 20, low of 540 on September 11th after a big decline. So we are watching.

In the bigger picture..

So, What have we learned?

  • First, a President who puts the stock market ahead of the real economy can push the market around a lot with tweets.
  • Second, I would expect that we will find that price earnings multiples were a function of manipulation rather than expected earnings growth going forward.
  • And maybe the most important factor will be the realization that Trump’s resistance to listen to science and his view that the pandemic was a short term issue is the core problem. Back in Early March he had his head of the COVID-19 Task Force Mike Pence tout, “by Memorial Day 2020 this will all be over”.
  • So what could have happened if Trump had been a leader instead of a touter. One idea jumps out, if he had accepted that we were looking at a 18 to 24 month window he could have invested government money to redeploy service workers with unneeded jobs into infrastructure builders and fixers rather than giving them money to do nothing,

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