A rabbit and a snake met in the forest and both of them were visually challenged. So the snake then slithered up to the rabbit and said: “your are soft, furry and have long floppy ears so you must be a rabbit”!
So the rabbit then said: “you are slimy, low to the ground and have no ears so you must be an A&R guy”!
From the Beatles to U2, how many A&R guys have missed it? seems like Politics and music have some things in common.
In the year since Donald Trump’s upset electoral victory over Hillary Clinton, the stock market has soared to record-breaking heights. No first-term president has overseen a post-election market rally this strong since people were singing, “Happy Days are Here Again” after the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932.
But even more remarkable than the Trump rally itself has been the delicious comeupance of so many market pundits, Wall Street analysts, and economists who had announced before the election that a Trump victory would crash the market, prove instantly ruinous to the economy, and produce any number of terrible financial consequences.
We may never know exactly what caused the poobahs to warn that we risked vengence of the gods of the Market by voting for Trump. Most likely it was some combination of solipisism (they didn’t like Trump, so they figured the market wouldn’t), economic ideology (free traders always think markets will crash without their policies), and class bias (they heard the people singing the songs of angry men and worried that people would not be slaves again).
Some of us had argued before the election that the predictions of doom were badly off-base. If Trump were elected it would indicate that a substantial number of Americans believed that we really could “make American great again.” Surely that itself would provide a boost to investor sentiment, consumer sentiment, business sentiment, and the true and objective measure of those things, the stock market.
The Trump crash never even had the courtesy to stay around for a full day. After an initial slide in futures markets in the middle of the night, once it became clear Trump had won, stocks rose relentlessly. All three major stock indexes—the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq —rose on Nov. 9. Since then, stocks have been on a massive run. The Dow is up nearly 29 percent, the S&P 500 up by just over 30 percent, and the Nasdaq by 21 percent.
If the anti-Trump fearmongering were just a harmless fad–the market intellectual’s version of pet rocks or fidget spinners–we could afford to let it slip down the memory hole. But it is important to memorialize the errors of the pre-election pundits, if only to remind ourselves that many of those self-styled wise men got the most important story of our era so badly wrong. After all, some of the worst of the bunch are still out there predicting doom and gloom from Trump’s policies.
Regardless of your political views, something has to be said about self-confidence and a second look at today’s prophets – Craig Ferguson’s take on the Trump win: