Doing Well by Doing Good: Dump Your American Stocks |
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Before I go further here, let me qualify everything I’m saying here with a warning: I have no crystal ball from which to give people investment advice. However, I do know logic and arithmetic, apparently unlike Donald Trump, so I can draw out some hypothetical situations, which is what I do below.
There has been much discussion, both here and around the world, of the possibility of a flight from the dollar. This has always been a serious risk since Donald Trump took office, but the risk increased enormously from his deranged rant at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week.
Virtually everyone who was not on Trump’s payroll acknowledged that the speech was both scary and incoherent. He made threats to our allies, boasted about imposing tariffs based on personal whims, and displayed an extraordinary ignorance of major world events. With Trump commanding extraordinary powers as president as a result of a docile Republican Congress and servile Supreme Court the United States does not look like a good place to park your money.
There have already been some prominent instances of pension funds pulling their holdings out of Treasury bonds and other U.S. assets, but this is the less important part of the story. Most of the money at risk of leaving the United States is not held by public pension funds which may announce their decision to make........