Today Is Day One 2021. Happy New Year!
Episode 2: Make the Media Love the White House Again! China-style stimulus coming to America, says Ken. Meanwhile Smartypants in the Faculty Lounge says corporations killed classical liberalism.
Hello (is it me you’re looking for…),
Welcome to Double Plus, a randomly published Substack about big picture politics with a focus on China. Market insights based on the big picture view come from secret sources and myself.
We are watching Davos Man and their friends in Beijing. We read the CCP's tea leaves. We make and protect money, family and friends.
Let’s get raw, baby…
Today is Day One of 2021
Happy New Year, people of America and the World!
This is the first day of the year. Yes, I have a friend in Austria who said he cracked open a bottle of Ferrari sparkling wine to celebrate the return to normalcy.
What is normalcy, you ask? Is it the National Guard barricading Washington DC on Inauguration Day? Lord, I can imagine tens of millions of people in panic over such an image if this were January 20, 2017.
And rightfully so. But today, meh…it’s just to ward off the angry Trump insurrectionists. That’s literally what bumbling Oregonian hyper-partisan Ron Wyden said yesterday during Janet Yellen’s Senate Finance Committee hearings. He just had to get that dig in there, because that had so much to do with Yellen at TSY.
I was talking to a colleague from the Street today about Inauguration Day. I’ll call her an ex-Vampire Squid managing director and central bank skeptic. She’s famous.
“I agree that after today it’s a new day. I don’t know what to make of it yet. I will be observing from afar. It’s safer that way.”
If a return to normalcy means domestic policy is done between K Street and Capitol Hill, then honestly that is not something to celebrate.
If a return to normalcy means foreign policy is based off narratives created in Langley, and the forever wars to keep defense contractors going, then call me a normal skeptic.
One thing is for certain, we have officially segued into Make the Media Love the White House Again!
This is what Jake Tapper and Friends wanted. I hope they are happy. Your neighbor with the Make America Sane Again banner on their front lawn really just wanted CNN to be less outraged because their outrage was driving your neighbor insane. Today should clear that up.
I don’t know about you, but I’m dying for stories about whether President Biden looks more handsome in gold-trimmed or silver-trimmed aviators.
For those who think the new Biden Administration will be soft on China, think again. At least that’s what we are hearing from the likes of Yellen and Secretary of State nominee Anthony Blinken. The Trump tack on China continues at full sail. Biden will work with allies, but if allies don’t move, Biden will have to, unless he wants to look like a CCP stooge.
That would be akin to what the Democrats and Republicans put Trump through on Russia (minus the Mueller fiasco). Trump whacked Russia every chance he got, from sanctions approval (even if against his instincts; he signed it anyway) to sanctioning Nord Stream II, the natural gas pipeline that connects Russia to Germany. The Germans and the Austrians hated it. I guess they loved Putin. Merkel should have been impeached for it.
For sure, Trump left with his tail between his legs. No pardons for the main people the blue check marks on Twitter wanted pardoned – Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. War Room’s Steve Bannon got a pardon. But China sanctioned him today. He must be devastated.
Seriously, as this is Day One, I’m giving Twitter 10 days to calm the fuck down. If it remains a hellscape, I’m off it.
We always hear people saying, ‘Oh people complain about Big Tech but do nothing!’ Individually, you can do a lot. With Twitter, you can unplug. It’s not the end of your social life if you do.
Lastly, I know that political emotions are like Romeo and Juliet times 100. People are sad with Biden’s win, just like people were sad with Trump’s win.
In reality, Washington DC has little impact on your daily life. Unless you work for a government contractor or are in the military, DCs only impact on you is on the money they send to the States.
Some of you know this about me: my life was impacted by DC in the Cold War. My dad worked for Raytheon’s Submarine Signal Division. They built nuclear submarines to fight the Russians in the Reagan years. Those were “good times” for defense contractors. I went to Disney World twice. My family was the first in the Rapoza-Raposo tribe to go to Florida in the mid-1980s. We were the “rich ones”.
When the Cold War ended, my dad lost his job because Raytheon no longer had defense contracts to build nuclear submarines. I was a freshman in college at the time. I had to drop out. My dad became a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman.
It took me over two years to recover and finally get back on my feet. My dad took four years to recover before landing at Johnson & Johnson, from which he would retire 10 years later and make around $20,000 a year less than he did when my brother and I were discovering Orlando.
In 2000-01, I was a MoveOn.org activist, having been politicized by that job loss and the government’s very real impact on my life. George W. Bush’s victory was a “disaster for Democracy” I thought back then. September 11, 2001 for sure meant Bush was going to usher in military rule. If you were against the War on Terrorism, you’d be arrested for treason!
I was as sure of this as Rachel Maddow was sure Trump got elected because of Putin, and the Women’s March thought Trump was going to ban them just for being them.
The rhetoric now is that the Biden Administration will turn Trump staffers and supporters into the new Al Qaeda, arrest them all for domestic terrorism. The media openly support this.
We’ve seen some top media publishers call for censorship. Glenn Greenwald is all over this story and has the right analysis. You should subscribe to his Substack.
In the end, my Bush nightmare never happened. Odds are the Biden nightmare won’t either. Give it time. Chill out. Unplug.
Meanwhile, here are my two Biden utopia and dystopia predictions, some more radical than others.
Happy! : )
1. China-style stimulus is coming within 100 days. More stimulus checks. Market up.
2. Biden promotes Buy America legislation through an Executive Order (Trump-lite)
Sad. : (
1. The CIA/Pentagon get their regime change back. Next attack in the dusty Project for a New American Century’s “Securing the Realm” book: Syria.
2. A shooting by a disgruntled student angry at lockdowns. A Covid skeptic who follows “anti-vaxxers” on the socials. Executive Order shuts down gun shops. Lockdown and vax skeptics that are on the fence give in, now cool with the idea or risk being on the side of the shooter.
Here’s to happy!
The Wall Street Watercooler:
Tech Love Affairs Continue, & Avoid This Country
Raymond James recently put out a survey to clients and advisors, in which 64% of respondents said that they were going to spend more this year on technology than last year. That’s obviously because they are stuck at home, especially the plebs who work in restaurants and the Broadway actors. At least they’ve got Instagram! (God, I hope the missing Mueller Report chapters are found so they will have something to post about.)
When it comes to online spending (and wasted time), Raymond James believes those tech trends are “firmly cemented” and so they are the areas that you want to continue to invest in.
That’s cool. I agree. But I’m not investing in Facebook. I don’t care about its Oculus headsets being the future revenue driver. VR will be the new heroin.
I told you that I’d buy Mercado Libre over Amazon any day.
There’s this.
Nailed it.
Here’s where I differ from the RJ crew: they think we're going to return to double-digit earnings growth and that the S&P 500 earnings will average about 27% growth in Biden Year One.
However, RJ is a bit more cautious about small-cap as we head into this earnings season. Fundamentally, I get it. But if Wall Street is thinking about a China-style stimulus of more than a trillion bucks, then small caps will beat the S&P 500.
Also, judging by Yellen’s meeting with the Senate yesterday, the Treasury is going to pick up where the Trump team left off, maybe be a little harsher on “currency manipulators”.
The country I would definitely worry about here is Vietnam.
We buy more from Vietnam than we do each from Ireland, Germany and Japan. Most of this is due to China moving manufacturing to Vietnam, especially lower-skilled labor industries that have been whacked by anti-dumping and countervailing duties.
Having said that, as a country play, I’d stay out of Vietnam (VNM). You’ve been warned.
On Corporate Tyranny, by Smartypants.
“The people who sort of believe in markets or at least pretend to understand them, call for ‘freedom’, but it is a very restrictive concept of ‘freedom’. It’s not the ‘freedom’ for you to direct and live your lives your way. It’s the ‘freedom’ for them to direct and control your lives because they are free to do so. You are free to consume and obey. They are in favor of private tyranny, the worst kind of tyranny; because it is the tyranny of those unaccountable and who control large concentrations of wealth. Adam Smith is the posterchild of markets, but he was in favor of regulation when it benefits the working man and against interference when it benefited the masters of the universe. Smith was considered a radical at the time because he condemned an ‘all for ourselves and nothing for anybody else’ attitude. That’s the trajectory we have been on and continue to be on in 2021. The corporate view of ‘freedom’ is an abomination to classical liberalism. It’s my money, so it’s my way and everyone else can either deal with it or get out of my way because they don’t matter.”
Closing Credits:
Easy
I wanna be high, so high/ I wanna be free to know/ The things I do are right/ I wanna be free/
Just me, babe!