Nature may abhor a vacuum, but Wall Street really abhors uncertainty. As an investor, you can make money in wartime, and you can make money in peacetime. What is really tricky is to make money when one day you’re going to war and the next you’re not.
At the moment, we’re in a trade war – except when we’re not. The idea fluctuates not merely from day to day but from Trump Administration individual to individual on the same day. ...
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Christianity teaches you that there’s no Resurrection without the Passion – no triumph without the suffering of the cross.
But then, Jesus never met President Donald J. Trumpet.
On Easter Sunday – which celebrated the Resurrection of Jesus, the central feast of Christianity, when God’s love for man conquered the grave – it was all doom and gloom from El Presidente as he once again proclaimed DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals that buttresses those who came here illegally through no fault of their own, dead; and blamed two of his favorite whipping boys for it, Mexico and the Democrats. ...
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In the through-the-looking-glass world of Trumpian lunacy, it was perhaps inevitable that President Donald J. Trumpet should tilt his lance at one of the corporations that he was supposedly trying to help with his tax cuts and defend a business that has been laying off the very kinds of workers he swore to protect.
But then, little makes sense about Donnie Two Scoops’ attack on behemoth Amazon. ...
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Sometimes, it’s hard to know where to begin – with the rage and frustration at what’s happening in this country, I mean.
I just filed my taxes, which have increased almost $5,000, thanks to no itemized deductions any longer, a cap on property tax deductions and the elimination of the deduction of state taxes from federal taxes. How again is the tax cut this supposed to benefit the middle class? Oh, that’s right...
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The day I thought would come the day after Election Day 2016 is finally here. I thought the stock market would tank after Donald J. Trumpet became president of the United States.
But it never happened. Instead, in a kind of financial Groundhog Day, the stock market went up and up and up. And Trumpet, who never misses a moment to inject himself into every story, continuously took credit for this.
But now he has started a trade war, and the Dow futures are down 400 points on the news that economic adviser Gary Cohn is the latest to bail on the White House. The bet is that the Dow will open Wednesday down 1,000 points. ...
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Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. The Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte. Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. Russia’s Vladimir Putin. China’s Xi Jinping. And, of course, our own Donald J. Trump.
The world is in the grips of the strongman – tough, reactionary and taking no prisoners. Part of this is a response to the terrible, fascinating transition in which we find ourselves – a backlash to the global, multicultural, digital age to which so-called “feminine” energies (communications skills, sensitivity, a sense of service) are better suited. Part of this is the envy, rage and resentment, particularly in this country, of white, blue-collar males, who lacked the courage, intelligence, industry and imagination to confront their greedy employers and, failing that, reinvent themselves when manufacturing jobs began to dry up in the 1970s. ...
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Experts will tell you that the high-pressured setting of the Olympics’ global stage is like no other. It can make the favorites fall and rise again and the dark horses surge to the front of the finish line.
That was certainly the case of the magical two weeks in PyeongChang, whose motto might’ve been “Expect the unexpected.”
It was a time when America lost its record for most medals in the Winter Games (37, Vancouver) to Norway (brilliant with 39) while setting a new record for medaling in the greatest number of different events (11). So what Team USA sometimes lacked in depth, particularly in the glamour sports of alpine skiing and figure skating, it made up for in breadth ...
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