It was a hilarious week of American shenanigans as we saw the ex-president’s lawyers trying to justify themselves with every crazy reason possible, only to be shot down one after another within hours.
If you try to defend the indefensible, you start to dig a deeper hole and make yourself a bigger fool than you are every time you are caught lying. After a while, I lost track of the many lies that were said and simply come to the conclusion that this man cannot be trusted anymore.
It was mentioned that this was an insider’s job that spills the beans to the authorities on the dangers in the Mar-a-Lago compound and he was furious to want to know who was behind it. Hence the crazy push to want more information to be made public even though that will hurt his case.
He is back to his usual tricks to rally his MAGA troops to get them into a frenzy and trigger possible violence against the FBI. Then he offers to lower the heat which he had started!! How magnanimous!! LOL. I hope that the rational side of the GOP party will finally wake up to the nightmare that he is toxic to America and get rid of him once and for all.
No man can be above the law no matter who he is. One can continue to spew lies and reinvent alternative facts. It speaks volumes of the morality of America when such an immoral character can become president at any cost. I really do think that it is the beginning of the downslide of the country. It is starting to look comical that a person can really screw himself and yet his followers religiously defend him at all costs, blaming it on the deep state and various conspiracies. Throw logical thinking out of the door with the kitchen sink and the baby.
It is laughable to the rest of the world that this farce is continuing to distract the superpower nation from more important things like infrastructure and climate change agendas. Petty-partisan politics have crippled both parties to indulge in actions that do not benefit the majority. You can only look good if you make the other side look bad at all costs. Even when the majority of citizens agree on a certain cause of action, they will simply reject it in order to spite the other side. It simply makes no sense as to how a democracy should be run.
That is why I subscribe to the notion of having more than 2 political parties as a long-term solution. There are many that are disillusioned with both parties and do not want to vote on the binary choice presented. There should be a 3rd or 4th party that gives the platform for more ideology and political views. Chris Cuomo called this group of people free agents in his podcast. Andrew Yang is proposing his new Forward party as an alternative independent party.
Hopefully, this will break the deadlock between the current 2 incumbent parties and knock some common sense into the politicians. The will of the people could be better served this way. While we do see the disasters of other countries having too many fragmented political parties that sometimes result in small parties becoming kingmakers and tiebreakers, surely this is a small price to pay for the current American political mess, no?
Over in Asia this week, the major news was the fixing of the political dates for China’s re-election plans. The top management is supposed to retire after every 10 years but Xi is trying to make a pitch to go for a 3rd term now. The start of the process to get re-elected will be on 16 Oct. Xi is trying his best now to contain the fires of Covid and emerging economic issues like the housing crisis till then.
He needs to rally his supporters behind him and also ensure that his enemies do not sabotage his attempt to do the impossible, to get a third 5 years term. He strongly believes that he needs a longer runway to ensure that China remains on the correct footing and does not deviate from its longer-term strategic road map.
The US mid-term elections will also be around Nov too. Hence these 2 high event risks are closely watched by everyone. Markets could become highly volatile as traders watch every move and try to figure out how to navigate the turbulent waters till the end of the year while making sure that rising interest rates do not bring us into recession as we fight to tame the inflation monster.
It is quite difficult for me to fine-tune my portfolio, given that it had been hit quite hard in the first 6 months of 2022 with the general market’s meltdown. Thankfully, the past few years had been good market rallies but they had resulted in too many excesses which had been wiped out this year. I wonder if the old levels would come back again.
After the Oct/Nov event risks from the American midterm elections and Xi’s re-elections, I think that the supply chain issues would have eased and the interest rate hikes should have cooled inflation reasonably by then. Inflation should be under control then after 2+ years of Covid shutdowns. If things do not turn around by early 2023, I am afraid that the central banks would start to print money again to jump-start their economies.
We are already into Sep now and the weekly countdown has begun. We are heading into interesting days ahead…
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