there's an idea promoted by many Western economists and investors known as American exceptionalism now this is different from the version of American exceptionalism that is invoked by us politicians who argue that the United States is the greatest country ever with the best democracy and they usually invoke this term in order to justify bombing or invading a foreign country and overthrowing its government no this version of American exceptionalism advocated by the financial press is a kind of economic exceptionalism essentially it's the idea that the US economy is exceptional and that the United States has the greatest companies in the world and this explains why the US Stock Market dominates the world now it is true that US capital markets are enormous as of the end of 2023 the US Stock Market was more than 60% of the entire world's stock markets by market capitalization and in 2024 the US Stock Market exploded yet again there's a global stock market index followed by many investors called the msci world index that stands for Morgan Stanley Capital International World index and this includes large and medium-sized companies from 23 developed markets the idea is that investors around the world can follow this index and invest in the biggest companies around the world however as of November 2024 if you look at the sectoral waiting of This Global stock market index you can see that the top 10 companies are us companies and a stagger ing 74% nearly 3/4 of the entire Global index consists of companies in the United States if you start breaking down these indexes you can see that they are dominated by a small handful of us companies which are largely monopolies and oligopolies so yes it is true that the United States has very large and Powerful companies if you look at a list of the top 25 companies in the world these are publicly traded companies by market capitalization as of August 2024 20 out of those 25 top companies on Earth are us companies and they are dominated by big Tech monopolies like apple and Microsoft and alphabet which is the parent company of Google or Amazon or meta which is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram and what'sapp and in addition to Big Tech monopolies you have large pharmaceutical oligopolies and financial oligopolies so it's not necessarily that the US has the best companies in the world but rather the US has established monopolies that dominate much of the internet technology and social media platforms and websites and financial institutions that the world relies on in the 21st century and then there's also the fact which is conveniently forgotten by people who proze the idea of American exceptionalism that the United States has the exorbitant privilege of printing the dollar which is the global Reserve currency and that's not a coincidence the US government helped to design the International Financial system after World War II in a way that guaranteed that the US currency would be at the Heth of this system and this has guaranteed constant Global demand for us assets so during decades the United States has been able to maintain a massive current account deficit a deficit with the rest of the world importing the Surplus produced by workers around the world and whereas most countries would suffer from very high rates of inflation if they did that because their currency would fall in value and therefore it would be more expensive to pay for imports the United States has the exorbitant privilege of the dollar and it can continue to import and import and import and the US essentially exports debt people around the world who get dollars they invest in US assets including US Government debt which is treasury Securities US Government IUS and US Stocks ownership in US companies and this is one of the main reasons why US capital markets have done so well and indeed they have done very very well in recent decades if you look for instance at the S&P 500 which is the index of the roughly 500 largest companies that are publicly traded on on us stock exchanges you can see that in the past 30 years the S&P 500 has risen by nearly 700 perc and this is even clearer if you look at the NASDAQ which is an index which is more heavily weighted toward technology companies you can see that in the past three decades the NASDAQ has gone up by nearly 8,000% this does appear to be impressive and many economists and financial analysts look at this and they say look how strong the US economy is and the US economy has become very financialized in recent decade so many people have forgotten that the economy as a whole is not the same thing as the financial sector in the case of the S&P 500 35% more than onethird of the entire weight of the index which follows roughly 500 large US companies 35% comes from just seven companies which are called The Magnificent s and these are Big Tech monopolies alphabet or Google Amazon Apple meta Microsoft Nvidia and Tesla in 2014 these magnificent s or mag s big tech companies represented slightly under 10% of the overall market capitalization of the S&P 500 I made a spreadsheet showing the waiting of the largest companies in the S&P 500 and in the msci world index these are two of the most important stock market indices on Earth the top 25 largest companies by weight in the S&P 500 which the way we you can measure this is by looking at the main ETF the exchange traded fund for the S&P 500 which is called the the Spy the Spy you can see that the top 25 companies represent 50. 3% of the weight of the entire index 25 companies represent over half of the index just the top 10 companies represent 37. 6% of the entire weight and really it's actually nine companies because alphabet divided its shares into voting shares and non-voting shares so Apple Microsoft Nvidia Amazon meta Tesla broadcom alphabet and birkshire haway together repres presentent 37.
6% of the weight of the entire S&P 500 and the list of the top 10 companies in the msci world index is basically the same the top 10 companies are us monopolies that represent 26. 3% of the entire Global index managed by Morgan Stanley Capital International if you want to get an idea of just how cartoonishly overvalued us companies are look at the market capitalization of Tesla in 2021 Tesla's market cap was $1 trillion making it larger than all of the following market caps of these companies combined Toyota Volkswagen byd damler GM BMW Ford stellantis Honda and saic all of them combined had a slightly smaller market cap than Tesla a single car company now Tesla's stock price has been very volatile because it's basically a speculative Financial investment this is not based on the fundamentals of the company people invest in Tesla because of Elon Musk the CEO and especially now that he will have a senior role in the Trump Administration after Trump won the 2024 presidential election Tesla stock once again skyrocketed and as of January 2024 the stock was around $380 us which is roughly the same level as the previous peak in late 2021 which was when Tesla's market cap was larger than the market cap of the 10 large car manufacturers around the world combined so earlier I mentioned that the stock market is not the same thing as the economy this is a clear example why in 2021 Tesla produced 930,000 cars worldwide in contrast just Toyota produced 10 million cars in the same year 20121 so Toyota produced more than 10 times as many cars but Tesla's market cap was 4 times the size of Toyotas in 2021 so why is Tesla so cartoonishly overvalued it's not because Tesla makes the best electric vehicles on Earth there are multiple Chinese companies that make electric vehicles that are better than Tesla cars and also way cheaper like byd for instance although many people in the United States will never be able to even try a byd car because the US government put 100% tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles but no that's not why the price of Tesla stock is so absurdly high now Defenders of Tesla will say that Tesla is not actually a car company it's a technology company but I would go a step further and say really Tesla is a financial firm that makes a few cars in reality the purpose that Tesla serves in the global economy is it produces a financial asset called Tesla stocks which investors around the world hold their wealth in because they expect that Tesla stocks will go way up up in price Tesla's stock has become like Bitcoin the fact that Tesla produces cars is not super relevant many people are simply investing in Tesla stock because they expect capital gains it's pure speculation it's not based on any fundamentals they think that by investing in Tesla they'll get rich because the price of Tesla stock can only go up supposedly we have been led to believe and this is of course why Tesla stock has been extremely volatile but the point I'm getting at here is that Tesla and other big tech companies in the US the price of their stock is not really based on fundamentals it's rooted in the financialization of the US economy the role of the US dollar as the global Reserve currency and the fact that investors around the world wealthy people around the world are holding their wealth in the form of stocks in these huge us corporations because they think that this is going to make them even richer so these companies really are Financial firms that maybe produce a few cars or make a few phones or design some software but their real purpose is to maximize shareholder value that's the purpose they serve they are at the center of the largest financial bubble in history the US stock market is in the largest bubble ever significantly larger than the bubble in 1929 that crashed and ultimately led to the Great Depression in the 1930s now there are two main measurements that economists typically use when they try to determine whether or not a market is in a bubble the first is looking at the overall market capitalization of the companies in the stock market as a percentage of GDP the gross domestic product of the entire country which consists of the value of all of the goods and services produced in a country in a given year that ratio the market cap of the stock market to GDP is called the buffet indicator the other measurement that is typically used is called the PE Ratio the price to earnings ratio which looks at the price of a company's stock in relation to its inflation adjusted earnings especially over a longer period of time like 10 years to see whether or not the price of a stock is very overvalued compared to the fundamentals of a company I will look later at the PE Ratio but I want to start by looking at the buffet indicator if you look at the market capitalization of all of the publicly traded companies in the United States which you can track on an index called the Willshire 5000 as of December 20 24 it was 206% of GDP this is the highest level ever recorded I repeat the market capitalization of all of the companies and the US stock exchanges together is more than double the size of the entire economy 206% of the value of all of the goods and services produced in the US economy in one year back in 2000 before the bubble burst the peak of the com bubble was 138% of GDP in March 2000 here we are today at over 200% the current bubble in the stock market makes the do Bubble look like Child's Play for comparison if you go back to the late 1970s before the rise of neoliberalism of free market fundamentalism with people like Ronald Reagan in November 1978 the market capitalization of the US Stock Market was just 36% of US GDP but you can see that in the decade since that has exploded as the US economy has become financialized and essentially the US economy today is built on a huge financial House of Cards now that data I was just discussing in was looking at the market capitalization of publicly traded companies if you go further and include the value of both publicly traded companies and private equities so this is the value of privately owned companies that are not sold in stock exchanges the total value of public and private equities is more than 300% of US GDP at the peak of the dot bubble it was just over 200% now it's over over 300% and what's incredible about this data is if you look at 2008 during the financial crisis obviously the stock market collapsed in 2009 it reached a low point of 100% of GDP and since the great financial crisis the previous bubble that had been deflated has been inflated to levels never seen before in history we're talking about the biggest bubble ever and this was not simply an act of nature one of the main reasons is that the US government intentionally inflated that bubble because it made Rich donors who fund the campaigns of politicians from both the Republican and Democratic parties it made them way way richer especially after the 2008 financial crisis the US Federal Reserve the US Central Bank implemented an easy money policy flooding the economy with money especially the financial sector and when the FED reduced interest rates to zero they decided it wasn't enough to stimulate the economy so they implemented quantitative easing that is the US Central Bank the FED bought up US Government debt treasury Securities and the balance sheet of the FED exploded from under $1 trillion during the financial crisis to a peak of nearly nearly $9 trillion in 2022 and where did all of that money go those trillions of dollars went into asset price inflation into inflating the stock market and real estate and other Investments where the wealthy were parking their wealth looking for higher yields and this easy money policy is a kind of drug for the financial sector they need this liquidity in order to continue in inflating the bubble or everything might collapse and the speculative Financial house of cards that the US economy is built on could come crashing down so even though in 2022 the FED raised interest rates and implemented quantitative tightening to try to ostensibly reduce the money supply in reality the money supply actually continued to increase in this period and this was largely due to the other sources of liquidity that were provided to the financial sector an example of this is that while the Federal Reserve was implementing quantitative tightening and raising interest rates the US Treasury was emptying the treasury general account in May of 20122 the treasury general account was at nearly $1 trillion it was $946 billion over the next year that was emptied to almost zero in June of 202 23 it reached the the low point of just $45 billion so it went from 946 billion to 45 billion that is an injection of $900 billion of liquidity into the economy into the financial sector by the treasury Department by the Biden Administration and this easy money policy was totally bipartisan it was started by the Obama Administration after the financial crisis it was continued under Donald Trump in his first term and it was continued under the Biden Administration and why is that it's because large billionaire oligarchs the financial sector big corporate monopolies fund the campaigns of politicians from both parties and then there's also the fact that in the US Congress insider trading is absolutely rampant nearly oneth of US Congress members have been caught buying and selling stocks with in many cas is private information they have access to this is corruption and yet it's so common in the US system it's a systemic problem and then these same companies that are profiting from the easy mon monetary policy are funding the campaigns of US Congress members from both parties and they themselves the actual politicians are also profiting I mean it the corruption goes so deep so the inflation of this massive bubble the largest bubble in history was not just a product of nature it was a product of US government policy on behalf of the corporate oligarchs because as I've been repeating here just because the stock market grows doesn't mean the overall economy is healthy in fact in many ways the stock market and the real economy have an antagonistic relationship and you can see this very clearly when you realize that 93% of stocks in the states are owned by the richest 10% of Americans in fact the richest 1% of the US population owns 1 half 50% of all corporate equities which is stocks and the richest 0. 1% of the US population owns nearly one quarter of corporate equities that is 23.
6% of stocks owned by the top 0. 1% of the population meanwhile the bottom 50% of the US population only owns 1% of stocks again that is 170 million people the bottom 50% owning 1% of stocks whereas the top 1% owns 50% of stocks now earlier I mentioned that the measurement that is often used to decide whether or not a market is in a bubble is called the buffet indicator this is the total market capitalization of the stock market as a percentage of GDP it's called the Buffett indicator because of course it's named after the renowned billionaire investor Warren Buffett and back in 2014 a decade ago he warned that investors should be wary if the buffet indicator was at greater than 100% of GDP today it's well over 200% of GDP an editor of the financial media Outlet Forbes and a former investment banker Robert lensar published an article back in 2014 warning that US Stock markets were entering a new bubble and it's exploded much further since then and he pointed out in this article that in 1929 on the eve of the Great Depression with the famous collapse of the stock market in 1929 the market capitalization of the US Stock Market was 81% of GDP and during the Great Depression it collapsed from 81% in 1929 to just 25% in 1933 again today it is over 200% of GDP which makes the stock market bubble of 1929 look like nothing so as it's become more and more more obvious that the US Stock Market is in the biggest bubble in history what are wealthy oligarchs doing you know these are people who have hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth they want to manage it they don't want to lose it in another crash well as you can expect we see some of the most powerful oligarchs in the world have been quietly cashing out and selling many billions of dollars worth of stock Warren Buffett after whom the Buffett indicator is named has sold $66 billion of stocks through Buffett himself and through his investment company birkshire Hathaway in 2023 and 2024 alone they sold $66 billion of stocks in the second quarter of 2024 Warren Buffett's birkshire Hathaway sold 75 . 5 billion of stocks and in the third quarter they sold another 34.
6 billion so just in one half of 2024 they dumped more than $100 billion dollar of stocks so what are Warren Buffett and birkshire haway doing with all of this money they're sitting on a huge stash of $325 billion in cash now when investors say cash they don't mean actual cash in a bank account because if you don't have your money invested anywhere it's going to lose value over time with inflation so when investors say cash they usually mean that it's invested in cash-like assets usually treasury bills so these are shortterm US Government debt Securities that are up to one year or maybe some treasury notes of two years maybe three years but Warren Buffett and birkshire haway are sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars of cash-like assets because they don't want to invest in the US Stock Market because they can see that it is extremely overvalued and there is likely going to be some kind of major correction sometime soon this is why the Wall Street Journal published an article in November 2024 titled does Warren Buffett knows something that we don't it noted that birkshire hathway is hoarding cash in a pattern seen before the financial crisis but it's not just Warren Buffett some of the most powerful billionaire oligarchs in the United States have also been dumping stock in February of 2024 Jeff Bezos the founder of Amazon sold $8. 5 billion of Amazon stocks that was in February then in July Jeff Bezos announced in a regulatory filing that he planned on selling another $5 billion of Amazon shares in November Jeff Bezos then dumped $3. 4 billion of Amazon stock so as of November 2024 bezo sold $ 12.
5 billion of Amazon shares in 11 months you know who was also doing the same Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook which K meta which is the parent company of not only Facebook but also Instagram and WhatsApp Mark Zuckerberg sold two billion dollar of meta stock in 2024 and what this is very reminiscent of is when Elon Musk the founder of Tesla sold $7. 5 billion of Tesla stock back in 2022 when Tesla stock had gone to the moon and he wanted to capitalize on that and he was actually sued a lawsuit accused Elon Musk of insider trading when he sold the $ 7. 5 billion of Tesla stock so what is going on here why are these billionaire oligarchs some of the most powerful people on Earth dumping so many billions of dollars of stock in their own companies well I think it's pretty clear they can see that the US Stock Market is in a massive bubble and they want to cash out before before there's a major correction or even potentially a crash don't just take my word for it in 2024 a prominent Wall Street hedge fund manager Mark spitznagle warned that the US is in the quote greatest bubble in human history end quote the financial times also published a very good article in December 20124 titled the mother of all bubbles the US has never been so overhyped relative to the rest of the world the author of the column rucher Sharma wrote that in the investing world the term American exceptionalism is hotter than ever Global Investors are committing more Capital to a single country than ever before in modern history and he noted as I mentioned earlier that the US accounts for 70% of the leading Global stock market index up from 30% in the 1980s he warned that this problem is much bigger than just an AI bubble focused on artificial intelligence technology and he wrote quote thoroughly dominating the Mind space of Global Investors America is over owned overvalued and overhyped to a degree never seen before as with all bubbles it is hard to know when this one will deflate end quote I agree with him it's impossible to know when the bubble will burst the only thing that is certain is that at some point the bubble will burst as all bubbles have always done in history however if we look back at recent Financial bubbles we can see that they have often continued to inflate much longer than some of the most brilliant Financial analysts thought they would this is especially clear when you look back at the com bubble that burst in 2000 back in 1996 the chair of the US Federal Reserve the Central Bank Alan Greenspan famously warned of what he called irrational exuberance in stock markets when Greenspan said that in December 1996 the market capitalization of the US Stock Market was 86% of GDP however over the next four years after he warned of irrational exuberance the stock market got even more and more irrational until in March 2000 the bubble peaked at 138% of GDP so the bubble had only just started inflating when greenpan warn that there was likely a bubble there are striking parallels to what's happening today in March of 2024 the president of the Atlanta fed made comments that were obviously referencing the famous remarks by Greenspan the Atlanta fed president Rafael bosk wrote that quote this threat of what I'll call pent up exuberance is a new upside risk end quote so pent up exuberance he did not just pick the word exuberance for no reasons I'm sure he knows the history of Greenspan warning of irrational exuberance and this was a way for a top monetary official in the US to send a signal out that they are concerned about the possibility of a new bubble like the bubble in 200 and the pent up exuberance has only continued with the election of Donald Trump after Donald Trump won the November presidential election the stock market once again skyrocketed and there are some Financial analysts and investors who are saying oh it's not a bubble we can continue to invest more and more to justify their argument instead of looking at the buffet indicator they look at the PE Ratio this is what I mentioned earlier which is the price to earnings ratio this looks at the price of Company's stock in relation to the inflation adjusted earnings for those companies over the previous 10 years when you Analyze This previous 10-year period it's known commonly as the Schiller PE ratio and the argument that some investors make is that well in December 2024 the Schiller PE ratio was only in scare quotes only 37 but what they don't mention is that at the peak of the stock market bubble in 1929 the PE Ratio was 33 so lower than it was in 2024 and the price to earnings ratio for us companies listed in the S&P 500 peaked in December 1999 before the Bubble Burst at 44 so the PE ratio of 37 in December 2024 is getting very close to the peak of the dotom bubble so I would be very skeptical of the people who say the party will never end now that Donald Trump has been elected the markets are going to continue to Roar stocks will go to the Moon everyone should go out and continue to pick up pennies in front of a steamroller now OB obviously geopolitical economy report is not an investor focused website not at all our focus is on geopolitics and economics we're not focused on giving investment advice to anyone this is not investment advice but I would be very very careful you can see the billionaire oligarchs are already cashing out I think they can see very clearly that the party is ending but then again the whole point of a bubble is that it's based on irrationality that invest s are behaving irrationally and markets are behaving irrationally that's the first half of Greenspan's famous quote on irrational exuberance and especially with Donald Trump's pledge to cut taxes on the rich and to cut taxes on corporations it's very possible that the bubble will continue to inflate more and more into more and more irrational territory of course the first time Trump was president during his first term he cut taxes and it benefited the ultra rich in fact in 2018 the richest 400 families of billionaires in the US paid a lower effective tax rate than the bottom half of people in the United States and furthermore economists at the institute on Taxation and economic policy analyzed Trump's proposals for his second Administration and they estimated that Donald Trump's policies will result in a reduction in taxes on the richest 5% of the population especially the richest 1% of millionaires and billionaires in the US but meanwhile taxes will slightly rise on the bottom 95% of people and why is that it's because Donald Trump's tariffs will increase the cost of consumer goods that people need for their everyday lives and the less money that a person makes the more of a percentage of their overall paycheck they spend on consumer goods and food and other services that are needed for everyday life this is known as the marginal propensity to consume and lowincome workers have a larger marginal propensity to consume than the ultra Rich because if you have billions of dollars and you get another billion dollars you're not going to buy significant ific L more food or clothes I mean you're already super rich but if you're living paycheck to paycheck if you're barely making ends meat and then your paycheck slightly increases you are going to buy better food more food you are going to buy things that previously you would not have been able to buy so in other words Donald Trump's policies are going to result in a reduction in taxes on Capital and an increase in taxes on labor average working people are going to have to pay more through tariffs and rich people are going to pay less as their taxes are reduced so this is going to be a redistribution of wealth from the working class to the capitalist class the rich are going to get much much richer and what are they going to do with that wealth well they may invest it in the bubble in the stock market or maybe they'll invest it in private equity and they'll buy at more businesses more doctor's clinic and dentist offices and veterinarian clinics and nursing homes and properties which is what private Equity has been doing cannibalizing the economy buying up everything the private Equity bubble is also very likely to continue to inflate as the rich have more and more money and they're looking for Investments to park that money to get some kind of yield to make themselves even richer because what Donald Trump's really doing is trying to bring back reaganism and there are some people who say well Trump is different than Reagan because Trump is a protectionist but Reagan was also a protectionist actually although Reagan had a rhetoric claiming that he supported free markets and was against protectionism in reality in 1987 the rean administration imposed 100% tariffs on Japanese electronic products especially semiconductors which is once again deja vu one of the big parts of the US trade war against China in the 21st century and of course this is bipartisan it's both Republicans and Democrats who are imposing heavy tariffs on China Donald Trump first in his first term put heavy tariffs on China and then Joe Biden the Democrat expanded those tariffs further putting tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and batteries and solar panels and semiconductors but again the point is is that Donald Trump is continuing the same economic Playbook that Ronald Reagan used in the 1980s this is the same old trickle down economics they claim that if you cut taxes on the rich and cut taxes on corporations they will supposedly use that money that they saved for productive Investments to create jobs but that narrative is simply not true a 2014 study found that 95% of the earnings of SNP 500 companies were spent on share BuyBacks and dividends that is to say when rich people and corporations have their taxes cut they're not spending all of that money on productive investment to create new jobs a lot of that money simply goes into inflating the bubble in the stock market companies buy back their own stocks in order to increase the price of stocks which means that Executives the CEO and other Executives of the company get larger bonuses because typically their pay and their bonuses are based on the stock price of the company or they they give dividends out which encourages more investors to buy stocks because they think they'll get higher dividends so in reality cutting taxes on the rich in corporations often does not lead to productive investment creating new jobs it leads to further inflation of financial bubbles which which is exactly what we've seen in the United States since Ronald Reagan and the rise of neoliberalism free market fundamentalism in the 1980s and it also explains why private Equity is now buying up everything and cannibalizing the economy because the stock market is so obviously overvalued in a big bubble so these billionaires and these oligarchs have so much wealth they're looking for something to invest in so they've been buying up the entire economy they've been buying up hundreds of thousands of homes they've been buying up clinics offices small businesses they're not investing it in creating new businesses and innovating they're buying up existing businesses and cannibalizing them destroying them selling them for parts and this is why I think it's still very possible that that the bubble can continue to inflate at some point it's gonna pop but no one knows when and given that Donald Trump has nominated as his treasury secretary the billionaire hedge fund manager Scott bessent it's possible that investors will continue to inflate the bubble because the US Treasury is going to tell them they should do so and when Trump was president the first time he constantly sent out tweets boasting about how much the Dow Jones was rising and how the US has the strongest economy in the world because for a billionaire oligarch like Trump Trump he sees the stock market as the same thing as the economy and although the financial sector and the real economy are not the same thing it is true that in recent decades the US economy has become extremely financialized according to data from the US Bureau of economic analysis the Bea in the early 1950s manufacturing represented 28% of US GDP and the Finance insurance and real estate sector known as the fire sector was only around 10% of GDP however with the rise of neoliberalism of Market fundamentalism the US economy de-industrialized and by 1997 the manufacturing sector only represented 16% of US GDP and the fire sector represented more than 18% of US GDP now what's annoying is that the US Bureau of economic analysis SE operates its data from 1947 to 1997 and then they have a separate section of their website from 1997 until today but if you look at the second half of this data you can see that this trend has continued and as of 2023 the finance insurance and real estate sector the fire sector represents 21% of US GDP whereas manufacturing represents just around 10% of GDP so more and more the entire US economy depends on the further inflation of these Financial Bubbles and the US economy produces fewer and fewer actual products actual tangible manufactured goods that people need to have a better life and of course one of the reasons Donald Trump won the election both the first time and the second time is because he tapped into the anger in the US about the loss of good manufacturing jobs and dustrial ization which has destroyed the economies of areas of the US like the Rust Belt however Donald Trump has no actual solutions to de-industrialization just look at his his cabinet look at the top officials he has nominated for his second Administration there are at least 13 billionaires in his second Administration Trump himself is a billionaire these are not people involved in manufacturing for the most part most of them are billionaires invested in finance or in the pharmaceutical industry in the case of Vic ramaswami or again Trump picked as his treasury secretary Scott bessent who is a hedge fund billionaire from Wall Street so Donald Trump claims that he wants to bring back manufacturing jobs and reindustrialize the US and yet he surrounded himself with financial speculators and oligarchs from Wall Street who have a direct direct vested interest in not reindustrialize in further financializing the US economy in further inflating the financial bubbles that the US economy has relied on and it is in their economic interest to have an overvalued US dollar Wall Street wants an overvalued US dollar because when other currencies fall against the US dollar it encourages investors around the world to exchange their currency for dollars and to invest in US assets which is another reason why there's been this big bubble in not only the US Stock Market but in many other assets this is referred to as the everything bubble real estate is another example in a conservative estimate at least 30% of us residential housing is bought as an investment not to actually live in so as investors not only in the US but around the world buy up real estate the price of houses goes up further and further average working people cannot afford to buy a house and this is a key reason for why homelessness has become such a horrific problem in the US which you can see in every major city just in 2024 alone the number of homeless people the official number which is a conservative estimate increased by 18% in one year and in 2023 it increased by an additional 12% and why can't average people afford homes because rich people are buying them all up as Investments which they then rent out to people on Airbnb or they just find someone to rent their home that they buy in not to live in but as a speculative asset so if Donald Trump truly wants to reindustrialize the US he will have to take on Wall Street but he surrounded himself by people from Wall Street and Trump himself is a billionaire who is Heavenly invested on Wall Street and furthermore if Donald Trump truly wants to reindustrialize the US he will have to bring down the value of the US dollar now Trump has claimed at multiple points that he does want to devalue the US dollar however at the same time he's constantly threatening other countries that are trying to dollarize which would help to bring down the US dollar if there's less Global demand for the US dollar its value should go down against other currencies and yet Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened countries that are dollariz he threatened to impose 100 % tariffs on bricks countries if they dollarize if they try to create an alternative to the US dollar so Trump has to pick is his loyalty to Wall Street and the billionaires he surrounded himself with in his government or is his loyalty to Main Street does he actually want to reindustrialize the country it's pretty obvious that I'm skeptical I think at the end of the day it is going to be Wall Street that wins because it's Wall Street that has has won for decades US government policy for decades by both Republicans and Democrats has been made on behalf of Wall Street that's precisely why the richest 1% of people in the US own 50% of stocks and it's why the richest 0.
