Who will win in Trump vs red-shirts?

COMMENT I can see clearly that there are various pull and push forces at work in our economy.

Some of these forces are linked to political ones, about which the economists attached to the banks or universities do not want to talk about publicly. But they will be happy to do so privately, or in the coffee shops with their good friends.

Other forces are more obvious, but it is still useful to emphasise on them in case they are easily forgotten.

Let me flag some of these, which will be of special concern to investors in the market.

Firstly, there is of course the Trump effect.

Readers will recall that I had predicted - contrary to many analysts - that the US stock market would head higher post-Trump's victory. Well, for now, my prediction has proven to be correct.

One of the world's foremost business newspapers, the Financial Times, in a lead article on Nov 26, noted that when Wall Street traders departed for Thanksgiving, they could celebrate a rare achievement.

Last Monday and Tuesday, the four most widely cited indices of US stocks - the S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Nasdaq Composite and the Russell 2000 - hit all-time highs simultaneously.

The last time a “grand slam” happened was on New Year’s Eve 1999, at the height of the tech bubble.

The article noted the breakthrough for stocks in the US, which had moved sideways for two years since the Federal Reserve stopped its quantitative easing programme, seemed to confirm a regime change.

Prompted by Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, the narrative has changed to preparing for an era of tax cuts, deregulation and fiscal stimulus, after eight years of markets being guided by the Fed’s historically low interest rates...