Yet another slow-motion human catastrophe seems to be starting to play itself out in the US. Yes, Trump’s strange attempt to undermine the finances of the American university system, one of our crown jewels, by barring its highest-paying students from attending, disappeared almost as soon as it was unveiled (to be fair, my guess is Trump had no idea what he was doing; he just wanted to burnish his xenophobe credentials). But the real economic/social issue is the rolling start to the national school year next month. Just as with mask wearing, Trump appears to be insisting on resuming school in person and on schedule, which seems to me to be a recipe for another surge in coronavirus cases, similar to the one resulting from Trump’s urging southern and western states to reopen too early.
I think the stock market reaction to this will be twofold: to stop the rotation away from secular growth to domestic cyclicals, and to reconsider whether or not the latter’s current prices are too high.
What I have tended to forget is that, possibly ex the UK, the US response to the coronavirus has been by a mile the worst in the world. Europe and Asia are already starting to rebound at the same time equity investors are coming to grips with the fact that Washington–and a number of state governors–are about to inflict another round of damage to GDP.
Anyway, my thought is to reduce my exposure to what I see as very expensive tech names and build up cyclical exposure–in the EU and Asia.