I guess I’m past the point of pretending there’s a decent bone left in my body. Whenever I see news of another nuclear bomb test or missile launch, I stand on my chair and cheer. Anything – ANYTHING – to get this market to fall. So long as it doesn’t hit Palo Alto.
Now that I’ve finished being charming, I’ll mention the obvious, which is that, as of this moment, the ES and NQ are weaker and gold is stronger thanks to Kim returning to his shenanigans. Until this chubby, hairless blob of a man-child actually starts blowing things up besides fish in the Pacific, this dips are going to get tinier and tinier.
Hopefully Trump’s chiding and poking will push him over the edge. Of course, Trump has a HUGE incentive to send Kim into a frenzy, since that would be the perfect, made-to-order distraction from anything pesky Mueller might serve up.
I have made the remark that a nuclear attack would just push the market to new highs. Almost all of this has been driven by whining and sneering snideness, but let’s take the notion seriously just for a moment. What if, following an actual attack (or even a meaningful conventional weapons attack on Seoul), the powers that be wanted equities to recover? What would they need to do?
It occurred to me today, which is this: if North Korea decides to finally get real, instead of all this screwing around, and Trump keeps his promise to wipe them off the earth, then what?
Well, cynical as I am, I do think that, for a while, that would, thank God, finally drive equities down. But here’s the thing……….it would be temporary. Because there’s all KINDS of good news you could spin out of this.
Notably, you could talk about how the “overhang” of the North Korean risk has been eliminated, sort of like when Eastern Europe was liberated (that is to say, when the assets of the USSR were freed into the hands of a few oligarchs). In the early 1990s, the peace dividend was quite the BFD, and stocks enjoyed ascending for almost the entire decade.
So if there WAS no North Korea, just about the only nasty thing left in the world would be a few insane Islamic terrorists, who are stateless anyway. In other words, pretty much the last lunatic country left on the planet wouldn’t be around anymore. And that, my friends, makes for a VERY bullish story.
Ah, I see that the 8.50 drop on the ES has trimmed to only down 7 now, so maybe the healing has already begun and this is another false alarm. Oh, well. I just thought I’d share those thoughts, just in case any muckety-muck reads Slope and was looking for some good ideas about how to get a silver lining out of the cloud of the apocalypse. You’re welcome.
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