Post 629 - July 15, 2024

At a meeting Michael and I had the other day, we were shown a graph representing the performance of the American financial markets in recent history. By recent history, I mean within our lifetimes. What it showed was that the market, when you are looking at the bigger picture, has risen steadily, and dependably, since before we were born.

Overall, we have seen almost the same financial gains to date under Joe Biden that we saw under the previous guy. At a slightly steeper slope than forty-five degrees, the graph line just keeps moving up.

Even with some massive setbacks like Black Friday in 2000, the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008, the pandemic in 2020, we are now, according to the graph, exactly where we’d be if none of that had happened, and we’d just kept growing at a steady pace. In each of those cases, we recovered and grew past where we had been before the dip occurred.

Over the decades since World War II, the market has managed to correct itself regardless of who was in office. There have been plenty of individual casualties along the way, and not a little bloodshed, but in the aggregate, nothing has kept it from its course. It is almost as if it doesn’t matter what we do, in terms of policy, the market takes whatever we throw at it and keeps expanding.

Financiers, I’ve realized, don’t control the markets, they surf them. Like the tide, the market ebbs and flows. To make money and survive, you need to be able to judge when the waves are coming and either get out of their way or figure out how to climb on top of them and ride. Nobody is going to stop them from coming.

Financially, therefore, it almost doesn’t matter which guy gets into office.  The markets will keep whoever is sitting in the Oval in check and dictate their broader policies. There is, apparently, more than one way to skin a cat, and they all eventually work.

The reason to vote for one person over the other, therefore, comes down to how we choose to navigate the financial waters morally. Do we do it in a way that protects the individual as much as possible or do we disregard the little guy and give our all to the corporate structures driving the money engine? Either way, it seems, we see economic growth.

Historically, the Democrats have tried to protect the population, in other words, us, from being chewed up by the relentless forward motion of corporate profit margins. The Republicans, on the other hand, have long felt that we, the people, are just a hindrance and an obstacle in the system. Our assets, like Social Security, they think, would be better used as fuel for the market’s fire, rather than being wasted on helping us mere mortals survive.

Money comes into play because those with a lot of it can hang ten on the waves in a way that those without it, can’t. Just how much money, I wonder, does one single person need?

In an interview many years ago, Bruce Willis was asked how it felt to be getting whatever fortune he was about to earn for an upcoming movie. He said that after you can pay the Con Ed bill without having to check your bank balance first, it was all just numbers.

It is all just numbers. Unless those numbers are being spread around like manure encouraging young things to grow, what good are they?

If finances, despite what we’ve been led to believe, aren’t really affected by who’s in office, then what is? Well, it seems to me, everything else.

When Michael burst into the room yesterday and said that T&*@p had been shot, I could not have been less surprised. I’d been waiting for something like that. My reaction was immediately cynical, and my first thought was that the whole thing was just a set-up. Somebody set fire to the Reichstag so that Hitler could make use of the confusion and terror and grab more power.

My reaction was cynical because, over these past few years, I have been carefully taught to be cynical. Very little happening around us is what it seems on the surface. The forces in our lives seem to be one manipulated ploy after another. They are all designed to keep us in check, or to keep us spending, or voting, or not voting, or simply just to keep us willing to be led.

The Republicans have fought long and hard to give everyone unfettered access to guns. They have blocked any attempts of us putting even the most reasonable of obstacles in the way of anybody being able to purchase the most lethal weapons imaginable. Even the mentally ill can buy them without restriction.

Last year, some Republican members of Congress began wearing pins in the shape of AR-15 assault rifles to support their commitment to gun ownership. They started doing this right after the mass shootings in public places like schools and churches where exactly that type of rifle had been used to mow down children and others by the dozens.

The presumed Republican nominee, the man the whole party is solidly behind, is an advocate of political violence. He spurred his supporters to attack the US Capital when he lost the election in 2020 and he has vowed even more violent reprisals should he lose again. This is the man who said Republicans were so stupid that he could shoot someone to death, and they would still stick with him. “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

How then, is it in any way surprising to anyone, that a young 20-year-old Republican man got hold of an AR-15 rifle, himself, and tried to assassinate the presumed Republican nominee? It’s what he has been taught to do. It is exactly what the people around him are fighting for him to be able to do. Everyone attending the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania yesterday is throwing their support behind a party that is attempting to build a society where this kind of violence is commonplace. Demanding free access to weapons and encouraging violence ends exactly the way that it did yesterday. How on earth could it not?

People’s reactions yesterday spanned the spectrum. Some were aghast, some mournful, and some immediately started posting comic memes. People then became angry at the jokesters and contemptuous of the bereaved. Others, like me, immediately became suspicious.

The Republicans have a lousy track record in terms of expressing their sympathy when something tragic befalls a Democrat. For the most part, they simply don’t do it. Yesterday, however, President Biden reached out to his wounded Republican opponent and offered sympathy and wishes for a speedy recovery.

It’s going to take a while before the facts surrounding the shootings come fully to light. My knee-jerk reaction was to go straight towards a conspiracy theory. I usually try not to do that. I’ll keep those pesky thoughts to myself until some real investigation reveals the truth.

In the meantime, how do we react to what happened? When people fight for things that you don’t agree with, you must believe that they want them. The attendees at the campaign rally were, and presumably still are, fighting hard for a gun culture and the normalization of violence. If they aren’t, why are they supporting that candidate? Therefore, the only logical conclusion is that they got exactly what they wanted. Didn’t they?

When people fight against regulatory laws and restrictions, it seems to me, that it is usually because they, themselves, want to be free to decide. The problem is that if everybody can do whatever they want, they can also do whatever they want to you.

Without agricultural laws, you might be free to use whatever pesticide you want, but so can Monsanto just upstream from you. Without regulation, Monsanto could render your land barren with whatever noxious chemicals they run off into our nation’s water systems, and you would have no recourse.

Without reasonable gun control, you might be able to do whatever it is you want to do, but then so can everybody else. If nothing is stopping a disgruntled twenty-year-old from getting his hands on an AR-15, then you must expect that you very well might end up being on the receiving end of a bullet from him. It is illogical to think otherwise.

That financial graph Michael and I were shown at our meeting surprised me no end. I’m not sure I’d ever thought about the markets with that kind of perspective before. The last eighteen months or so have been great economically for our country. Inflation is finally starting to go down. This past April, the markets hit a glitch and slid down, but as of today, we have moved past that. We are currently situated almost exactly on the straight upward growth line. Whatever losses we experienced earlier in the year; the market has recovered from them and gotten back onto its steady course.

I can’t decide whether to be comforted by the market’s seeming indestructibility or completely horrified by it. There is a limit, surely, to how long that growth line can continue climbing up. To keep growing we need to keep expanding. To keep expanding, we need more consumers with more capital to spend. What happens when we max out?

This week’s election episode was a doozy. Where this is going to end up is anybody’s guess. You can be sure, though, that we are going to see a lot more of that raised fist and blood-smeared face printed on just about anything moving forward.

On the plus side, however, nobody has said a thing about Biden’s age in well over a day.