If the reports I’ve been reading are accurate, voters in yesterday’s election had two main worries that they expressed through how they cast their ballots:

–the high, and rising, cost of living in the US, with the price of daily necessities increasing considerably faster than wages, and

–public corruption, with both elected and appointed officials using their offices to enrich themselves and their families rather than furthering the public good.

Both are the result of deliberate choices made by Donald Trump, blessed by the Republican party, and carried out with the support of its elected officials, as well as by the Trump cabinet appointees they approved.

Trumponomics

The Trump agenda appears to me to be taken pretty much from Japan’s successful plan to rebuild its industrial base after WWII by emphasizing export-oriented manufacturing. That is:

–weaken the currency, to make domestic labor relatively cheap,

–set up tariff barriers to discourage consumption of foreign-made products.

The current generation of workers will be deeply economically disadvantaged, but its children and grandchildren will benefit.

Japan’s success made this the playbook for just about every successful emerging economy over the past three quarters of a century.

For the US, though, this strikes me as loony.

And, of course, the attack on Iran, both in itself and with its amateur hour nature, hasn’t helped things either.

I interpret the election results as a very loud enough-is-enough, both for Mr. Trump and for his Congressional enablers.

As to the stock market, the key to success–until very recently–has been to find companies in NASDAQ and the S&P 500 that have as little dependence as possible on the US economy for their sales. In contrast, firms that cater to Americans of average or below-average means would be especially problematic.

Put more simply, overweight tech, underweight the consumer.

I’m thinking that the election, and its strong repudiation of administration policies, has probably flipped the script. For me, this means poking around in lower-end domestic retail for the first time since Trump took office.