This is incredibly simple-sounding, but investing isn’t rocket science and 40+ years of active US market experience (admittedly, I didn’t pay much attention during the Asia boom of the 1980s) says to me that it has some merit: stocks either go up or go down.

They don’t often just stay in place and do nothing. The current US market is telling me that domestic stocks don’t really want to go up. So… they’re beginning to go down. Not clear how far or for how long, but down is the flavor of the moment. So this is a time to trim positions that have needed trimming and to pick (lower) prices to buy things we like but have judged were too expensive. A less risky approach is to try to ferret out the inevitable clunkers you eye skips over when looking at performance figures and just swap into something better, rather than holding cash and trying to time the market.

I find it interesting that other markets, especially ones in Asia, are not following suit so far. My guess is that, unlike the case in the past, global investors are not going think of a US correction as a great chance to shift their portfolio structure toward the S&P–the big AI NASDAQ stocks, maybe, but nothing else. This even though the US has been the worst-performing major stock market in the world this year. Toxic, anti-growth domestic government economic policy is the reasonfor the relative decline, in my view. (Things don’t look as bad domestically as they really are because the currency has fallen through the floor since the inauguration. In dollar terms, the S&P is ahead by +15% ytd, EAFE by +27%.)

Two aspects:

–ICE is using armed masked men to arrest, imprison and deport Hispanic workers, with, if press reports are accurate, little regard for whether they are citizens, or legal immigrants, or not. Again, these are people likely to spend most of that they earn. So, the reputational damage to the US aside, ICE is shrinking domestic GDP.

–at Trump’s direction, Washington is shifting the flow of government payments away from the less well off, who are most likely to spend, to the ultrarich, who are much more likely to dump the funds into their Scrooge McDuck money pits. Today’s earnings miss by Disney may be a concrete early sign of the economic damage this anti-growth policy is doing.

Yes, this is Trump’s economic plan, if plan is actually the right word. …the plan a majority of American voters approved during the presidential election. But if media reports are to be believed, over the past months Trump has already traveled pretty far down the dementia trail broken by Biden, with actual policy now being directed by minions who, unsupervised, are giving it some extra oomph. And the presidential platform itself is much more economically (and socially) toxic than I think voters understood. To my mind, and increasingly the opinion of a majority of Americans, l think, the biggest problem is the willingness of Congress to stand by and watch the shining city being torn down.