Monday, February 11, 2013

Politics and Strategy

Risk takers will listen, sort of, to Obama’s State of the Union tomorrow.  Nothing good can come of it, explaining the “sort of.”

Obama’s focus on things economic is driven by ideology, not the bottom line.

Some say Obama is clueless on the economy. No. He knows for example that taxing the rich makes little difference to the US bottom line; in fact, he knows that taxing the rich may even prove corrosive to the revenue take.  That is not what his crusade is about; it is about the exercise of leveling, an exercise cloaked in the notion of enforced fairness.

Obama has a second term because a good portion of the electorate is not engaged. Next, things that may sound absurd to most of us get a pass from gender-studies coeds and the faculty-room anointed. And the rest who pulled the trigger?  Well, they just want stuff.

Obama’s goal, actually a stealth goal birthed by exposure to his Marxist father is not about all of us having a freedom of choice in order to thrive, but simply about ensuring that someone else does not have more.  Obama is American perhaps by birth but certainly not by spirit.

Thus, for all the reasons detailed in earlier posts, readers are not to succumb to what looks easy, what in the past was in fact near-automatic – a robust recovery.  Instead, readers are to look for both consumer and corporate risk takers to shy just ahead. For the consumer it is taxes; for the risk taker, it is a reluctance to enter the game, knowing the rules will change every quarter.

That is why we have set levels on the term structure, a handy little spread for purposes of illustration.   Course-of-least resistance – narrower over the near term.


Robert Craven

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