Thinking Out Loud on a Sunday Evening…

Today I have been scanning a number of pieces written by mid-east observers and analysts.

Here is what jumps out at me.

1. I see the anticipated Trump Market Crash being pushed back even more by Trump’s entrance into mid-east affairs. That means to me sometime after the mid-term elections.
2. I say this for a number of reasons. As I have mentioned many times in the past year or so, I have put all my traditional trading methods and ideas on the back burner. In a sense I have gone back to methods that I used in the 1970’s, using a mix of macro fundamentals and intuition with charts and cycles only as a backstop.
3. What that means for me, is that if I had to list in order, starting with the factor having the most impact, I would put “reading Trump as number one factor, maybe 2/3 of a decision.
4. In a Macro sense I see Trumps drivers as being:
5. A.: Building a huge Family asset base that will put his family in charge of piles of capital around the world for years after he leaves office. Kind of using JFK’s dad’s legacy model.
6. B: The current war action is no doubt driven by what he and Netanyahu believe, the “Greater Israel” concept, destroy and pull seven countries into one “Big Israel”, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Iran, and parts of Egypt. Wesley Clark way in 2007 mentioned an Israel memo that he had seen on the subject, outlining this Israeli idea of the future. What we are seeing at the moment is the parting shot. Reality, however, is that this idea would take a lot more time and money than Trump can put together, so one can view this as waste can material.
7. C: The concept of Government Debt being a real problem is not believed by Trump, Bessent, or Warsh. They have plans to lower short term interest rates and then have Treasury buy long dated bonds. kind of like how the government bought the Social Security Trust Fund, issue I.O.U.’s.
8. So, there is no limit in their minds to debt.  15 Billion a week to create “Greater Israel” is not an issue, or sending 50 billion to farmers due to the tariff disaster, it’s just IOU’s. So called Tariff receipts are just a marketing play.
9. Bottomline, at some point Trump will declare victory in crushing Iran. Iran will keep on going, and invest their oil receipts into rebuilding. Who knows what will happen with their high caliber intelligence base. They might come up with small high powered shadow “nucs” that can be delivered around the world in the back of autonomous Tesla pickups, no need for expensive planes.
10. For a crazy thought, but nothing is crazy anymore, in the short-term, at the point of announcing the crushing of Iran, maybe on Easter Sunday to get the evangelicals really excited, Trump will announce something like the “S&P Victory March” and S&P’s will shoot up to maybe 10,000 over the following 3 months using Bessent’s IOU’s.
11. And then we can have the crash with Private Equity leading the parade down.