Coinbase jumped 31%.... Bitcoin topped $76,000, a record high..... Tesla surged 15%.... Bank stocks surged.... Citigroup was up 8.4%, Wells Fargo jumped 13%, Bank of America rose 8.4%, JPMorgan Chase was up 12%, Goldman Sachs gained 13%, and Morgan Stanley rose 12%.
And there were losers:
First Solar dropped 10%, Enphase Energy tumbled 17%, and other clean-energy stocks fell with a Trump presidency being considered negative for renewable energy companies.
Contrary to what you might think, crypto, Tesla, and banks are mostly the province of the affluent investor class. Green energy companies, by contrast, employ lots of middle-class workers. So.
The stock market is soaring, but not every stock has joined the celebration. DJT is down since Donald Trump won the election:
What's going on? Is there just lots of selling pressure as big investors get out while the getting is good? If any stock should have skyrocketed after Trump's win, it's Trump's own stock. I don't get it.
Donald Trump won by appealing to the working class with a bevy of promises. No tax on overtime! Bring back manufacturing! Tariffs on China and Mexico! Deport 20 million illegal immigrants! Slash energy prices!
But surprise! Can you guess what his top priority really is? Huh? Can you?
At the moment, I'm not much interested in the million and one liberal narratives floating around online explaining "why she lost"—all with remarkable certitude. Emotions are too raw and people are mostly just relitigating all their old grievances. But when a party suffers a six-point swing against it in every single state, the problem is something big and fundamental, not whether Kamala was chosen too quickly (please) or the press didn't tell people how bad Trump is (they did). A biggish slice of Americans just don't like the dog food Democrats are selling.
At the moment, I'd say the single most widespread self-critique is that Dems have abandoned the working class, so it should be no surprise that the working class abandoned Dems. The assumption generally is that we abandoned them economically, with no willingness to consider the possibility that liberals need to reconsider their cultural values. I suspect that's a serious mistake, but for now let's go with the economic argument.
Here's my question: What, exactly, can liberals do for the working class? The Trump answer, aside from rhetorical support, is basically (a) small tax cuts and (b) revenge against China for taking away our manufacturing jobs.¹ In other words, it's all vibes, since neither of those things will make the working class noticeably better off.
Kamala Harris's answer was a few small bore things like help with down payments. "Retraining" has historically been a popular suggestion, which wildly misreads what displaced working class folks want. Safety net programs? Liberals have long been hellbent on phasing them out at low income levels that bypass the working class. "Buy American" is popular with both parties, but it rarely gets enforced seriously and people are rightfully cynical about it. This kind of stuff just won't do the job.
I honestly don't know the answer. The problem is that Democrats have been remarkably successful over the years, leaving very few big-ticket social welfare items undone that might genuinely make a difference. Universal healthcare is the obvious exception, and putting long-term senior care under Medicare might be another. But they're both expensive and extremely difficult to pull off politically.
So if we confine ourselves to economic answers, there's not much available. Inflation was supposedly a huge issue this year, but if so it just means Democrats were doomed. Inflation was caused by the pandemic and ended by the pandemic. There was nothing anyone could do about it.
What's the answer? If we refuse to discuss culture-war moderation because, by God, those are moral issues and you don't compromise on morality, we're stuck with purely economic appeals to the working class. But what?
¹Some might add immigration hawkery, but I wouldn't. I feel pretty strongly that when you dig down, anti-immigrant sentiment is far more cultural than economic. "Oprima dos para español" pisses them off way more than the jobs virtually no white people ever lose to illegal immigrants.
Donald Trump might be the luckiest guy in the world. First off, in a single day he (a) was elected president of the United States, (b) escaped all of his criminal prosecutions, and (c) made several billion dollars from his now valuable holdings of Truth Social. He's also accomplished all of his promises:
He says he'll beat inflation, and it's already beaten. Last quarter it clocked in at 1.2% compared to the previous quarter. It was at 2.4% on a year-over-year basis.
He says he'll rein in illegal immigration, and it's already reined in. What's more, job demand has plummeted so pressure on the border will remain low.
He says he wants Israel to giddy up and finish off the war, and it's already winding down of its own accord because there are only so many Palestinians you can kill. It's likely to be over within his first year.
He says he'll turbocharge the economy, and it's already turbocharged. In the latest quarter, real GDP grew 2.8% and is now an astonishing 2.6% above potential GDP. That's the highest it's been in half a century.
He says he'll cut imports from China, and they've already been cut. Last year imports of goods from China came to 1.28% of GDP, the lowest in 20 years.
He says he'll get interest rates down, and they're already coming down. The Fed cut rates by half a point in September and has already promised more cuts to come.
He says he'll produce more oil and gas, and both are already at the highest levels in American history.
He says he'll get crime down, and it's already down because it never went up in the first place. The one thing that did go up was murder, and so far in 2024 it's plummeted to 4.4 per 100,000, the lowest rate in more than 40 years.
There's really not much left for Trump to do. All he has to do is not bollix things up.
Here's an interesting YouGov poll I happened to come across this morning. It asks people if, overall, social media is good or bad:
It's probably not surprising that young people are far more positive about social media than older people. But I am a little surprised about the big education gap. Is this because of education itself? Or because the kids of high school grads have more problems with social media than the kids of college grads?
Ditto for race. Why are Black people considerably more positive than either white or Hispanic folks?
For what it's worth, it all evens out. Among all adults, it's a dead tie between positive and negative. And positive feelings have been trending up for the past four years.
I guess the good news this morning is that practically overnight the US election system has become reliable and trustworthy. It's amazing the progress we can make in less than a week when we put our minds to it.
Last night I mused about the possibility that the election was really about inflation the whole time and the result has been baked into the cake all along. But that hardly seems possible. Overall inflation has been low for over a year. Food inflation is close to zero. Gasoline prices have been dropping.
But there's more to it. Here are three examples of big, recent, high-profile price surges that have far outstripped wage increases. First up is auto insurance:
Obviously this is not the fault of either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. But it's still big; it's painful; and it hits nearly everyone every six months in an unexpected and shocking bill. Here are credit card payments:
This is a combination of rising credit card balances and higher interest rates. That's mostly the Fed's fault, but who cares? It affects more than half the families in America and it's a big hit. Finally, here are auto loans:
Again, this is the result of normal inflation for new cars plus rising interest rates. The average monthly payment on a new car has gone up more than $200, and even if most people haven't bought a new car lately, it's the kind of thing they hear about from friends and neighbors who have.
I don't know how big a deal this is, but it doesn't all get captured in standard inflation statistics. Rising credit card payments don't get captured at all, for example. The end result is that rising prices and interest rates can be broadly more painful than it might seem they should be.
Not because a newly unbound Donald Trump will wreak havoc on American democracy. I've never believed that. He remains too ignorant, too vain, and too undisciplined to do that.
He'll still do plenty of damage. Like all Republicans, he'll continue to bankrupt the country with tax cuts. He'll have four more years to nominate conservative judges. He'll be disastrously inattentive to climate change. He'll fire Jack Smith and escape all responsibility for January 6. Palestinians will be even more utterly abandoned.
But the big ticket items he's been threatening will be hard to fulfill. Does he really want to deport every illegal immigrant in the country? I don't know, but at a minimum he'd have to hire half a million new ICE officers to do it, and Congress won't go along with that.
Does he really want to fire 4,000 civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists? Probably. But it's not clear he can do this on his own. The Project 2025 folks think he can, but it's never been tested in court and there's a good chance it would fail.
And all those panderific tax exemptions for tips, overtime, Social Security, and so forth? I doubt Trump was serious about them, and in any case Republicans in Congress won't go along. They're too expensive and don't benefit corporations or rich people.
RFK Jr. may want to ban vaccines, but he can't. Elon Musk may have fantasies about cutting the federal budget by $2 trillion, but he can't either. It's impossible.
Trump has more freedom to impose tariffs on a whim. But the kind of tariffs he's been talking about are so obviously brain dead I doubt even his most loyal advisors would stand by and let 'em rip. They'd violate treaties; promote retaliation; create inflation; and tank the economy. Even MAGA cultists have some kind of minimal survival instinct against such rank stupidity.
Of course, even if I'm right about this Trump will cause plenty of misery along the way. Immigrants will be terrorized. Ukraine will be left vulnerable to further Russian expansionism. God only knows what will happen on abortion, or what he'll do to trans people.
But even that's not why this is so depressing. That's simpler: It's the fact that Americans would elect a boorish, blustering, fantasizing, moronic, self-absorbed dimwit like Trump. Any other Republican, sure. Sometimes the country turns right. But how can a man like Trump be supported by the vast majority of the Republican Party? That's depressing.
