So how’s everyone’s end of the formerly-successful American economy going?
In case you hadn’t heard, the US stock market is in freefall [technically called: a “correction” when the drop is over 10%] and is taking the global stock market with it, all because the bad dad / client type [iykyk] who runs our country wants to make a power play using tariffs.
Nice work making your point, dude…the incompetence is on full display. Tariffs are, apparently if you’re a moron, meant to make people buy American, but … we don’t make all this stuff in the US anymore. Remember … NAFTA? The G8? We buy things from overseas, and do not have the infrastructure to make it all in house. So, this is going to not only rock company values aka the stock market, soon enough it will be coming to a wallet near you as prices for things are likely to jump as the cost of imported goods you still try to buy are passed along to us as consumers.
If you hadn’t stocked up on some imported things, I highly recommend taking a little shop ASAP this week.
Tariffs are so delusional and misguided even conservative old white dudes are speaking out against them, like in the Wall Street Journal and the Economist and Fox News and The Hoover Institution [a conservative/libertarian economics think tank at Stanford], where conservative-libertarian-legendary economist Thomas Sowell, said it’s “painful to see” … the administration follow in the footsteps of a “ruinous decision from back in the 1920s.” and referenced the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which were broad tariffs debated and implemented in 1929 and 1930, respectively, in an effort to protect American industries from overseas competition in the early stages of the Great Depression. Foreign countries retaliated, causing a decline in global trade that economists now widely believe deepened the Depression.”
[source – Fox news, I am not backlinking to them]
So, basically I hope everyone who voted for Trump “for the economy” is crying into their tanking investment accounts and shitty job searches right now.
However, I don’t want YOU crying into your tanking retirement or investing account right now, if you have such things.
Aside from the fact that we “need” retirement accounts being a neoliberal Reaganomics nightmare from which I wish we could all awake, the function of stock market holdings in retirement accounts is “money for 10-40 years from now” – and historically investments return positive [eg, make money] over any 15 year period – even including the great depression in the analysis. Check out the detailed analysis from the number-crunchers at Sensible Financial, or their helpful summary of historical swings in the stock market:
This doesn’t mean:
- It’s not going to be a rough ride that impacts poor and working class people more than people who have resources [it will]
- It’s going to be a fun few months/years [it is not]
- Or that those of us without safety nets should somehow be able to quell the alarm bells in our heads [these are legitimate]
- Everything will be fine if we just ignore it [not usually how things work]
- There’s a guarantee the money is coming back [there is no guarantee]
This does mean:
- If you are investing for anything that’s more than 5 years away, you are decently likely to have the money you put away … in 5 years
- Investing is for money you can walk away from for 5+ years [and ideally, longer]
- If you are investing with money you needed sooner than that, you just learned a lesson the hard way I am sorry to say
- And, finally: I can’t give you investment advice, just history. Historically, what goes down comes up – but no one will know when.