Former president Donald Trump called Melania ‘Mercedes’ as he praised his wife during a speech in Washington DC. The crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gave the former First Lady a standing ovation as Mr Trump described how “people love her”. “Oh look at that Mercedes, that’s pretty good” he said as the audience stood and applauded. The GOP presidential hopeful was making the keynote speech on 24 February on the same day as voters head to the polls in the South Carolina primary.
It’s a reflection of sentiment, when it’s going haywire that means the decision makers are nervous.
The US is clearly in a weaker position in terms of global influence than it’s been in the past 30 to 50 years. Any and every opportunity that they offer Iran, Russia, China etc. Is obviously going to further destabilize in unstable situation. The US can’t even get its budgets in order and face shutdowns on a quarterly basis. Throw a backup president into that situation and you don’t think there’s going to be major problems? That’s beyond wishful thinking and firmly in the fantasy land.
Sentiment is not reality. The stock market is a voting machine in the short term, but a weighing machine in the long term. This means yearly financials are the only thing that really matter for investing. Do not worry about a 20-50% drop in prices. That appears to happen every decade or so.
Just because it “goes crazy”, I guarantee you US Treasury Bonds will not go down in price. In fact, I bet they go up in price. Whenever there’s large issues in the world there’s a “flight to safety”. US Treasuries are the safest assets around.
I’m fascinated by the ability to see how completely fucked up American politics has been for the past decade+, and honestly believe that a president dying in office wouldn’t throw the government completely off the rails. It’s barely on the rails right now.
But at least there is a clear sucession if a President dies in office. Yes, they are the backup, but continuity is not in question. Its happened before, the Republic survived. We haven’t had any candidate die right before an election.
Well, there was RFK, he was killed before the convention and he wasn’t the front-runner at the time anyway. But that 1968 Democratic Convention could be rightfully described as “upheaval”.