Awaiting the Trumpian 'October surprise'

Outlook:

The only fresh information today is the Beige Book and a slew of Fed speakers, plus some important company earnings. No surprises there. What may be a surprise is a second stimulus bill, which looked impossible until yesterday. We say it's still impossible. It will get put on the Senate floor after five months of Senate leader McConnell refusing to allow it to go to a vote, whatever its terms. Now he says he will put it to the vote, but that may well mean he can engineer it to fail. Notice he didn't say it will go to a vote before the election or that he himself will support it. Former presidential candidate Romney has already said he will vote it down.

We wonder if this is not both the old Republican Establishment and the anti-deficit ultra-far right joining forces to put an arrow into the Trump campaign. It makes this new coalition a partner with the Dems. No spending bill, no Trump bragging he did something for the little man (which with 25 million unemployed is pretty far-fetched, anyway).

So now we have a weird new coalition forming organically (and temporarily) to get the gate-crasher lout out of town. Some even say the Supreme Court decision favoring the election counting in Pennsylvania is Chief Justice Roberts' vote against Trump, although it's also a classic conservative states right position.

Well, that's one way to look at it but let's not start to victory parade just yet. We still await the Trumpian "October surprise" that can set a whirlwind going. In the absence of any real shock, the dollar should continue on the weakening path.

US Politics: The election is less than two weeks away. Some analysts see Trump's campaign tactics as so badly thought out as to signal his acceptance of defeat. One ad guy who knows Trump well says Trump doesn't really mind, aside from the blow to ego, because he will start up a new network with 20 million people happy to pay a subscription fee every month to hear more of about his grievances and conspiracies. Trump mismanaged his real estate ventures—four bankruptcies-- but always made money in TV.

The top two topics are the pandemic and the economy. The average Joe knows Trump failed to manage the pandemic competently; one newscaster says Trump could have won, or gotten closer to winning, if he had accepted Covid 19, trumpeted mask-wearing (with MAGA masks), and gone to war with the virus. That could have been positioned as just as macho as not masking. He also neglected to get the Senate on his side for a second stimulus bill. Two super-bad decisions that may determine the outcome.

Over the weekend Trump put out a ridiculous statement on character; yesterday it was confirmed that over 500 of the children of deported illegal immigrants are lost in limbo—nobody knows where the parents are today. No wonder the US can't do contact tracing. Some character. Trump also called for the Justice Dept to open an investigation into the Bidens and accused Joe of being a criminal who should be in jail—without naming the crime. Again, this is how dictators do things. Trump is projecting his own faults onto someone else—he's the one who defrauded Trump University students, illegally used Trump Foundation money for personal use, including to bribe a Florida state official, directed US military and state officials (like VP Pence) to use his hotels for personal gain, etc. And oh, yes, told about 20,000 lies.

Finally, the NY Times discloses that Trump got about $25 million from Chinese sources in 2017 and continues to hold a checking account in a Chinese bank. If this gave China any leverage over Trump, it was not evident in the tariff wars.

Tomorrow night is the second and final debate between Trump and Biden. Trump was annoyed that the show managers refused to accept his insistence that the sole subject be foreign affairs, where he imagines he has an advantage. Biden supporters wish Joe to be less courteous and wish he would mention all those crimes and misdemeanors, and extend it out to foreign allies alienated and enemies emboldened. He probably won't, not because they are not true but because they are not useful to his campaign. Die-hard Trumpies already know those things and don't care. And the majority of voters are not about to let a minority with such bad judgment choose the president again.

Instead of foreign affairs alone, the agenda tomorrow night has these six topics: fighting Covid-19, families, race, climate change, national security and "leadership." Egad.

There is some talk about really bad outcomes that could accompany the voting process as it comes down to the big day next Tuesday. So far none of it is materializing, like armed thugs at polling places to intimidate voters. As for street riots when the results come in, it seems doubtful. If Trump wins, street protests, to be sure.

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