There are a lot of predictions being made right now. Keep track of them. I’ll revisit them periodically for the next six months or so.
If you run into any especially juicy ones, please put them in comments with links.
The most obvious failed prediction is Paul Krugman’s prediction of investor recoil from a Trump presidency:
It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?
Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear.
Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.
That had already been proven false before its digital ink had dried.
From Steven Rosenfeld at Alternet, 16 Worst Things We Can Expect From Trump’s First 100 Days, mainly a grab bag of executive order repeals on immigration, climate change, court appointments, normalizing hate crimes, etc.
Then there’s Sullivan’s The Republic Repeals Itself might be worth a re look in a year. BTW, Kevin Drumm’s response at Mother Jones is worth reading. Will omit that link to avoid spam trap.
Update
Thank you, walt. Kevin’s post is here and IMO it’s mostly on the money.
WRT the Alternet post I think he’s probably right on 6, 7, 8, 10, and 15. We’ll see about the others. I think that #11 is an interesting speculation but the stock market doesn’t seem to agree.
Krugman viddies himself a market guru!? Only relative to a barrel of monkeys. The very fact that he’s making predictions tells you all you need to know.
There is probably only one safe observation about equity markets and Trump right now: because he is an unknown entity risk may, at least temporarily, be up. Will that result in a downward general repricing? No one knows. He is talking about elimination of the 3.8% ObamaCare tax premium. I know the standard bias around here is that taxes don’t matter, but that change in cash flow goes straight into the DCFs people.