I wish I could say that, after today we'll know who's our next President and we no longer have to discuss all the BS but, if Trump's 2020 election was any indication, the BS is just beginning. The key difference is, of course, that Trump is not the sitting President this time so a lot of the nonsense he pulled in the last election (which didn't work) won't fly but, on the on the other hand - he did appoint 11 more Federal judges (and one Appellate judge) AFTER losing the last election - so you never know...
Like it or not, there's really nothing more impactful on the markets than the election. Even Fed Chairman Powell's JOB hinges on the election results as he recently defied Trump's demand not to lower rates before the election - as Trump felt it gave an advantage to Biden (at the time). Powell did lower rates 0.5% on Sept 18th but it certainly did not boost the economy. In fact, rates now are 0.7% HIGHER than they were at the time - it was an extremely ineffective rate cut.
In fact, yesterday's 3-year note auction went off at 4.152% - MILES higher than the Sept 10th auction at 3.44% and the Oct 8th auction at 3.878%. A whopping $58Bn was auctioned off and this was about as close to a FAILURE as you can get without actually failing to sell all the bonds. Mounting US debt may finally be finding the limits to demand.
Direct Bidders (US-based) fell from 15.7% to 9.6% while Indirect Bidders (Foreign Entities) rose to 70.6% from 66.5%. In other words, our fate is not longer in our hands as we are depending on the rest of the World to shoulder our $600Bn MONTHLY debt burden UNLESS, of course, we balance our budget and.... I'm sorry, I'm laughing so hard I can't even finish that sentence...
Not only is NEITHER candidate addressing our massive existing debt or projected deficits or rising debt service costs but BOTH candidates are ignoring the $2Tn of spending we SHOULD be doing to combat Climate Change for the next 20 years in order to save the planet.
Trump's solution remains simply pretending Climate Change isn't happening - despite melting mountains of evidence to the contrary. Harris' solution is to keep doing the halting steps that Biden has taken - way too little, way too late at that pace.
This chart is so depressing I don't even want to discuss it. You can read about it here but the bottom line is we're already at 1.5 degrees - we blew our chance to avert that when Trump abandoned the Paris Climate Accords in 2017 (one of his first acts in office). It's not like we had a good chance of avoiding 1.5 degrees anyway - but now we are talking about 2.5-3 degrees and that pretty much insures tremendous sea-level rises, a lack of fresh water, diminishing biodiversity and, of course, loss of crops that are likely to lead to mass starvation.
There may not be any cats and dogs left to eat!
IN PROGRESS