View of the Week (Special Edition) : On Changes in our World as @realDonaldTrump assembles his Government

The pace of change and the backlash is never ending.     As the World awaits the transition to the Trump Presidency, America's apparent "Brexit" is of concern--especially as a potential trade war with China looms.   The broadcast by the Mexican Foreign Ministry trying to assure Mexicans in the United States also underscores the level of unease around the World.

What Geoff Colvin underscored in his note underscores the level of anxiety and concern--our team found it interesting how he deemed Brexit a "fluke" even though it is part of the trend around the World for a rejection of globalization on a massive scale:

NOVEMBER 17, 2016 Brexit could be regarded as a fluke. Brexit plus Trump starts to look like a trend. A large question for all leaders now is whether the trend becomes self-reinforcing, an accelerating spiral of nations rejecting the open global order built over the past 70 years. Leaders will want to monitor several indicators that will answer that question in coming months. A lesson of history is that openness has to be fought for. Free movement of goods, capital, and people always confronts powerful opponents. Today’s globalism strikes us as a remarkable achievement, but remember that we’ve been here before. In the decades before World War I, people traveled across Europe and over most of the world without passports. Migrant workers crossed borders with few restrictions. And trade was increasingly free, accounting for a rising proportion of GDP in many economies. The war quickly reversed all that progress, and not until after World War II could nations begin the great project of returning to a more global order, which has since lifted billions of people out of poverty. It has taken decades because every step has been a fight. Are we about to reverse all that progress again? Could be. Brexit is an obvious reversal of the trend toward a more open Europe. Donald Trump’s promises to impose heavy tariffs on Chinese and Mexican imports, if he keeps them, would spark retaliation and a plunge in global trade. Exiting Nafta and the World Trade Organization, as he has also threatened to do, would cancel decades of work to widen free trade. Such actions by Trump would be especially dramatic steps toward a new cycle of global closing after a long cycle of opening, but other indicators also bear watching. Results of a national referendum in Italy on Dec. 4 could signal support for the explicitly anti-globalist 5 Star Movement. On that same day, Austria will hold the second round of its presidential election, in which Freedom Party candidate Norbert Hofer will probably do well and may win; his party is anti-establishment and anti-immigrant. And France’s presidential election in April and May now seems likely to be the strongest showing yet for Marine Le Pen, leader of the protectionist, anti-immigrant National Front. Finally, Germany will hold a federal election sometime in next year’s second half; the most striking trend in recent local and regional elections has been the weakening popularity of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party and the strong rise of Alternative for Germany, which is anti-immigrant, anti-euro, and opposed to further European integration. Populists in those countries and others, notably Hungary and the Netherlands, which also hold elections next year, cheered Trump’s win. They’re celebrating it as another step, after Brexit, toward an accelerating reversal of today’s open world order. Which it may be. Closing, which is economically destructive, begets more closing as self-defense or retaliation; it’s self-reinforcing. Opening, which is economically constructive, isn’t; it has to be fought for. We’ll know soon enough which way the world is heading. For better or worse, the consequences will be momentous.

"Love Trumps Hate"

“Love Trumps Hate” Bumper Stickers on Sale For $1! 

The Next Presidential Motto?

I truly believe that Donald Trump should buy these stickers and embrace the message of love over hate.  Okay, he can cut off the bottom hillaryclinton.com stuff because it’s not about that bitter election anymore. It’s time to set a kinder tone in our nation with the news of Eric Trump being heckled, Trump supporters being accosted, and of course select Trump supporters thinking hate crimes are suddenly okay.

I think it’s a motto that will work well for our President-Elect and will help him spread a message of kindness to all. You know he’ll be trying to “trump” everything he can. And did I mention these are on sale? He could probably get a really good deal since he used to be great friends with the Clintons. Seriously.

Of course the money probably still goes to Hillary (who still needs all of the support she can get), but at least everyone who already bought one could continue to display it and feel hopeful. 

https://shop.hillaryclinton.com/products/love-trumps-hate-bumper-sticker-combo

Stay positive!

NMD

View of the Week: On Fortune 2017 Crystal Ball

The team received this yesterday on what Fortune is forecasting for 2017--here is the summary by the Fortune Magazine's Alan Murray--a lot to think about:

NOVEMBER 16, 2016 Good morning. This has been a bad couple of weeks for journalist prognosticators, so it is with some trepidation that Fortune editors have again undertaken their annual “Crystal Ball” exercise. To shore up our instincts this year, we asked IBM Watson to scour some big batches of data and spot trends. Among them: The sharing economy goes south. Uber and Airbnb have been most popular in coastal cities, but it looks like next year they’ll be making inroads in the Southwest. There were significant spikes in news and social media mentions in places like Phoenix, Denver, Dallas. Antibiotic breakthrough. A deep dive into news sources and medical journals found a surge in mentions of late-stage trials related to CABP, a pneumonia related to drug resistant infections. Stay tuned. We also took some flyers on our own, without Watson’s help, including: Barack Obama will get a $20 million book deal. That one was too easy, right? How about this: Under Armour will merge with Lululemon. To be clear, we have no inside information. Or: Tax reform (a limited version) will pass. It has been three decades since the last one. For those who want to read about that unlikely triumph, my book Showdown at Gucci Gulch, is still in print. And the S&P will finish the year at 2073, about a hundred points below where it is this morning. To get the full Fortune Crystal Ball, you can go here. I should point out that last year we had some hits – predicting, for instance, that the Fed would only raise rates once in the last 12 months – and some misses – don’t ask us about the “Rubio/Haley” T-shirts we had printed.