That’s the title of an article that Gideon Rachman, an astute opinion writer for the Financial Times, published a couple of days ago.

Rachman starts with the caveats that Trump is a liar and that he tried to overthrow the government after he lost the 2020 election, but continues that…

…a lot of the current Biden anti-China policy is built on the framework established by Trump.

Rachman doesn’t mention, though, Trump’s panicky meltdown, no mask, no vaccine, inject-yourself-with-bleach, during the pandemic, causing, say, 250,000? unnecessary US deaths. Or his desire to disband NATO, in which case Ukraine would presumably be in Russian hands, with Putin now knocking on former Warsaw Pact doors. Or his opening the door for rival nations to supply agricultural products to China, damaging the US farmers who voted for him. Or his support for white racism.

Then there’s the weird case of Trump’s stolen secret documents. The mainstream narrative, I think, is that Trump is a real-world Smeagol, evil but pathetically obsessed with keeping symbols of his lost power. A darker narrative–no evidence I can see, either way–would be that he’s been providing access to these documents to prospective business partners and this is what the government wants to stop.

I take two important things away from the article. One is how quickly we forget. The other is that, ex the documents, if Trump had simply conceded defeat in 2020 we might be regarding him as the prohibitive favorite in the 2024 presidential race rather than as a breaker of his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

I’ve been working out most days on a rowing machine in my basement since the pandemic. I mostly listen to audiobooks. I’m closing in on the end of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. It’s 24 hours+ long.

The point of the book, as I hear it, is to elaborate on the now-familiar idea that internet giants like Google and Meta quietly collect and analyze immense amounts of user data, and employ their conclusions startlingly effectively to manipulate the behavior of these users. Sort of like advertising on steroids, with a twist of casino gambling, video games or MAGA …except that the surveillance giants are less than forthcoming about the the enormous extent of their data collection/analysis and the power they wield, especially over the young and vulnerable.

I have two issues with the book: it’s probably 2x (3x?) the length it needs to be and the style is borderline melodrama (although this may partly be the reader, whose other credits are mostly airport-bookstore novels).

The most interesting observation in it was the discussion of Google glasses, which was an attempt by GOOG to extend its surveillance from the written/spoken word to body language. My impression is that while we are generally somewhat circumspect in what we write, have no conception of how much information about what we are thinking we reveal through body language. Google glasses were a failure, though.

It’s now coming out that last March, ZM quietly altered its privacy policy and began surveilling users, presumably for facial expressions more than for the content of conversations erroneously thought to be private.

I find it hard to know what to do about ZM. On one hand, this move suggests to me that AM doesn’t see growth potential in its basic video chat business. The fact that it hasn’t flagged the change to terms of use suggests the company knows users perceive video chat to be qualitatively different from email, in two ways–that the conversations are private and the belief that ZM is making no record of its own of them. What appears to be stealth surveillance won’t endear it to users. On the other hand, what are the alternatives?

Looking at the stock, it has come down from recent highs and is off by about 4% today vs. a 1% decline in NASDAQ. Not a condemnation, but not an endorsement, either.

Yesterday, perhaps lost in news of the latest Trump indictment and the MLB trade deadline, Fitch Ratings (which is, along with S&P and Moody’s, one of the big three credit rating services) downgraded US Treasury securities one notch from the highest category, AAA.

The Fitch downgrade comes a dozen years after S&P did the same thing, leaving Moody’s as the only AAA holdout.

This might have been a big deal if the downgrade had come, say, a half-decade ago, before Xi began to blow up the Chinese economy. Back then, the world might have seen some form of renminbi as an adequate substitute. Maybe cryptocurrency would have been the big beneficiary.

And, yes, the US has third-world public infrastructure, a dysfunctional Congress, a resutling big budget deficit, and a major political party that believes the wrong side won the Civil War. But there really is no substitute for the dollar.

Hence, the ho-hum reaction in financial markets.

One issue (of the many) I know nothing about is whether this makes trouble for professional fixed income investment managers who offer products whose prospectuses say they hold only the safest securities. At the time of the S&P downgrade, ultra-safe was defined as having a AAA rating. After the S&P downgrade, managers said that really counted was that a majority of the rating agencies said Treasuries were AAA, not that the rating was unanimous.

On the same logic, Treasuries are now sub-AAA. This is an issue pretty much like the individual stock weighting issue for NASDAQ-linked index funds. Presumably, seeing the mess Washington has pretty consistently continued to make, prospectuses have long since been changed in anticipation of an ultimate downgrade.

I’ve just updated my Keeping Score page for July. It’s another in a considerable string of positive months. The last bear capitulating? …if so, that’s not a plus.