Inequality is very stretched in the USA, but so is the stock market. The Biden administration may close the gap between the two, and in coming weeks a stock market correction is likely.
This time last year I wrote a note entitled ‘Peak Trump, Peak Markets’. For a while during last March, I thought I had nailed the market forecast, but in the end, I got the important part of the equation right, and on January 21 Donald Trump played a lonely game of golf as the Biden administration got underway. At the present time I am tempted to say that we are in a ‘Peak Markets, Biden Nadir’ moment. That is not a reflection on the abilities of the new President but simply an assessment of the task ahead of him. In that respect two aspects of his inauguration ceremony struck me. Poetry in motion The first was a segment that the three former two-term Presidents (Clinton, Bush and Obama) recorded for NBC, as a message of support for Joe Biden. What was striking was how tired and troubled the three leaders looked, something that attests to the physicality of politics, and also betrays the ways America has been stress tested by the Trump presidency. The second, more uplifting aspect of the inauguration was the importance of poetry, first in Amanda Gorman’s recital of ‘The Hill we Climb’, and then in Lin Manuel Miranda’s rendition of Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Cure at Troy’. Heaney is a favourite of the President’s, though for poetry that resonates with great historic events he might also try Yeats’ ‘1916’.
