No. of Recommendations: 28
Addressing briefly the broader agenda of the report rather than the investment implications---
I'm a glass half full kind of guy. I always like to look for the silver lining in things. Even the weirdest rant often contains some good ideas, or thoughts that trigger good ideas.
Here's one: In this case, if one of the key intents is that Europe must work harder "combatting foreign influence", then it's wholly consistent with the advice to tell Mr Vance to stick his brown nose elsewhere, right?
More seriously, should Europe foot the bill for its own defence? Sure, even if the US has perhaps received a positive return from their expenditure because of the direct benefits to the US of the resultant peace and commerce.
Is Europe going to have more and more settlement/integration problems and costs in the next few decades as the northern half of Africa becomes uninhabitable and people move north en masse? Sure. I assume it will be the biggest population migration in the history of humankind. Those folks are behaving quite rationally, I might add--I'd do the same in their shoes. As an aside, I'm not sure why the US administration would be worried about this--global warming being a hoax and all.
Does all that mean that the people running the US government should endorse neo-nazi parties in European elections, that a Great Replacement Theory horror is imminent, or that such parties might forestall it if put in charge? Umm, no to all. (I'm not sure, but I don't think Godwin's law applies if one is talking about
actual neo-nazis...)
As for investment strategies such moves indicate, I have two general directions of thought. The nice guy approach, investing only in firms that do stuff so uncontentious and boring that nobody will bother to undermine them and they'll prosper even out the other side of any chaos. Breweries have long histories for this reason. And the dark side: buy into the firms doing the most lobbying. Those reliably do well, or at least better than other things, when governance takes a turn towards the Big Man theory. Look into the white papers from Strategas, mentioned here
https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/c... "Strategas has tracked a "Lobbying Basket" since 2009, which has consistently outperformed the broader market, even during periods when active management struggled. "Jim
