The battlegrounds are fluid as multiple dynamics are going on in this world; with the outcomes hard to ascertain. Not to mention GAAP vs Non-GAAP earnings show an incredible divergence. Some believe an Election trend toward Trump is a potential negative; others see Trump or Clinton as neutral for markets, while Sanders would be bearish. Trump’s economics sound childish on the surface; at the same time the irony is the outcome might be different. However, either way a pricey (based on valuation) U.S. stock market is again the focus; and can take a bit hit in the near future, irrespective of the domestic politic prospects, or lots of propaganda (from our own politicians and foreign leaders worried about loosing the market and currency advantages they gained from us).  

What’s at stake is nothing less than global stability, against despite politics here in the U.S.; as it has been known politically and even sociologically. Sovereigns across the globe are concerned. Is this an overstatement? No. The U.S. is just the most visible anti-establishment campaign ‘we’ see. Look at the UK, France, or Germany, and you see domestic versions (that’s why Merkle’s CDU Party lost 2 of the most loyal states in the past week’s elections; although that resulted of course from a highly different mass-migration political calculation she’d made).   

While it’s probably not an overstatement to say how much is ‘in play’; I hope so in a way. Whether it’s Chinese miners rioting today (not being reported widely); or political chaos in the United States (again a revolt against the establishment, whether viewed from either partisan side, or just a conclusion that our politicians become too comfortable in DC; as even if they arrived with good intentions, they become influenced by a slew of lobbyists and so on, more than the citizens who sent them there); or the threat of the migrant invasion of Europe (even with all compassion to refugees) shifting political allegiances, and provoking a return to sovereign nationalism.

Then you have the ‘outliers’, or wild-cards, which include North Korean threats it seems we’ve become accustomed to); China’s effort to refocus local worries by creating enemies in the form of claims upon international waters; or even by the flooding of foreign markets with even-cheaper goods that destabilize what’s left after their cannibalizing industry (mostly due to our own mediocre trade policies) for decades now from not just the U.S., but the now-less-industrialized West.