The Presidential Debate: Painful, Predictable… Perilous
By Charles Sizemore, Chief Investment Strategist, The Freeport Society
Do you have something you love to eat… but that makes you regret it every time?
Yeah, me too!
For me it’s a massive pepperoni pizza. I’ll eat the entire thing… and then regret it for days.
But while the pizza grease makes me miserable after the fact, at least I enjoy it in the moment. I can’t make the same claim for a certain event scheduled to take place this Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern.
Seriously, I’m not sure why I watch presidential debates.
They’re not entertaining. In fact, they’re usually cringeworthy.
Maybe I do it to feel better about myself… Whatever my sins, I have to be better than these guys, right?
Or maybe I committed some awful crime in a previous life and this is some form of self-punishment.
Regardless, I’ll be watching President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump duke it out on Thursday.
It’s safe to say that I’m not expecting a reenactment of the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. I’m not even really expecting anything resembling coherent thought. I fully expect we’ll see childish playground insults from Trump and tone-deaf self-congratulatory pats on the back from Biden.
And there’s no doubt that both of these weasels will squirm when asked to defend their records on inflation.
A Grain of Salt and Cherry Picking
I don’t make a habit of listening to “Democrat economists” or “Republican economists.” I take the words of all economists with a massive grain of salt. But if I can identify one as a political hack, I generally dismiss them out of hand. I have no need for cherry-picked data taken out of context to defend a pet policy.
Still, when I hear economist and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers (he’s a Democrat) utter the words “mother of all stagflations,” I perk up.
I’ve been writing for months in The Freeport Investor about the risk of stagflation setting in. Stagflation is what brought down both the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter presidencies, and it’s Hell on Earth to live through.
Our last bout of stagflation in the 1970s prompted entirely new economic stats like the “Misery Index,” which was a combination of the inflation rate and the unemployment rate.
Like any “political” economist, Summers overly simplifies and generalizes. But he’s not actually wrong about stagflation risk. And while his attack focuses mostly on Republican Donald Trump’s policy proposals, Summers also bashes the Democrats.
In fact, he actually compares Trump to George McGovern, the Democrat presidential candidate that Richard Nixon utterly destroyed in the 1972 election, winning 520 electoral votes to McGovern’s 17.
So, what is it, exactly, that Summers believes will spur the mother of all stagflations?
Tariffs.
We’ve Seen This Movie Before
Trump has proposed hiking tariffs to 10% across the board, advocating 60% tariffs for most Chinese imports. More broadly, he plans what Summers calls “economic warfare.” In addition to tariffs, the second-term presidential hopeful calls to lower the value of the dollar and strong arm the Federal Reserve into lowering rates. Oh, and, of course, to deport 15 million illegal migrants, which isn’t going to help the ongoing labor shortage.
Our politicians of both parties are a creative lot. Neither lacks new and original ways to make the world a worse place. But mercantilism – the belief that the government can somehow manufacture prosperity by putting up trade barriers and limiting competition – is like socialism. It seems to be an undead zombie policy that just keeps coming back no matter how many times it fails.
American companies are the best in the world. They don’t need to be protected. And when they are, the results are predictable. Coddled and protected companies get bloated and complacent, and the quality of their products suffers.
As a case in point, my first car was a 1984 Pontiac Parisienne sedan. It was a shockingly massive piece of junk that I sold for spare parts when it had barely 70,000 miles on it. Cars from the 1970s and 1980s generally conked out long before they hit 100,000 miles. They were terrible cars… mostly devoid of any style, originality, or personality.
Compare that to today…
It’s not unusual for cars to last for 200,000-300,000 miles with only minimal maintenance. Even fairly basic models have bells and whistles that would have been the stuff of James Bond movies a few decades ago.
What changed?
Competition.
New entrants first from Japan and then later from South Korea and elsewhere forced American automakers to up their game. It was a matter of building a better product or going out of business.
Here at The Freeport Society, we are unapologetically pro free trade, proudly following the tradition of Adam Smith.
Yes, there are practical limits on free trade just as there are practical limits on free speech. Death threats, for example, aren’t protected speech. We understand that it may be necessary to restrict free trade in military hardware, nuclear material, or other things critical to national security. But with those precious few exceptions, Americans should be free to trade with whomever they see fit and with minimal interference from Uncle Sam.
Tariffs, by design, increase prices. That’s the last thing we need in a world where inflation stubbornly refuses to die.
Tariffs Also Kill Growth
The Great Depression didn’t start out as the Great Depression. It started as a deep but relatively ordinary slump.
It’s widely accepted today that protectionism – and particularly the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 – pushed it into “great” territory by spurring a collapse in international trade.
Trade between the U.S. and Europe dropped by about two thirds over the four years the tariff was in place, and the economic calamity that ensued helped lead to the rise of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and the Second World War.
Trump’s tariffs likely won’t make it through Congress if he gets elected. He isn’t exactly known for focus or follow-through. Besides, he’s already made it clear that his priority upon taking office will be settling scores with political rivals rather than advancing any actual policies. But the fact that we’re having this discussion at all just goes to show that some ideas, no matter how phenomenally awful, just refuse to die.
And while we’re talking about terrible ideas that refuse to die, President Biden has a few of those rattling around in his head as well.
His Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 – which was essentially a funding bill for green energy projects – may go down as the most deceptively named bill in American history. It added a few hundred billion dollars in government spending… and I can’t find a single historical example or even a theoretical construct in which borrowing and spending reduced inflation.
His insistence on eliminating student debt – but not my mortgage or credit card bill! – threw a few extra logs on the inflation fire as well. And let’s not forget that he continued to pour debt-fueled pandemic stimulus into the economy long after the need for that had passed.
Now, in just four days’ time, we get to listen to the two old men in the back of the Muppet Show argue about why each of their ideas are somehow less bad than the other guy’s.
No matter how many cringeworthy moments we get to endure on Thursday, do yourself and your family a favor…
Have inflation hedges in place. Think gold and crypto.
Invest in exponential progress. Consider the leaders but also the pick-and-shovel companies without which progress would be impossible.
And find those companies that produce the currency of the super rich: income.
To life, liberty, and the pursuit of wealth.
Charles Sizemore
Chief Investment Strategist, The Freeport Society
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