Decisions made by the Federal Reserve not Trump or Harris will drive our economic future

Our financial and economic future does not hang on who lands in the White House but rather by the decisions made by the Federal Reserve.

Yes, your short and even medium term economic and financial future will continue to be made in Washington – whoever wins on Melbourne Cup Day.

Just to be clear, that’s whoever wins on November 5, on the other side of the Pacific, not at Flemington.

While of course, the race closer to home will have been well and truly run and won – along with another done and dusted RBA interest rate decision – well before we get the result out of America.

But while your future will be, largely, ‘made in Washington’, it will be made somewhat less by who’s taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Even in combination with the mix on Capitol Hill.

It will continue to be more potently made in a building behind the White House, on the corner of 20th and Constitution: the home of the Fed. The Federal Reserve.

The White House in Washington DC.

In combination, with of course, Wall St; in all its ‘glorious’ manifestations: perennial prompter, demander of rate cuts; forecaster of cuts; and then reactor to what the Fed does or does not do.

Quite simply, where goes Wall St – so recently, to a dazzling new record high – so goes our market and so, your superannuation.

Get your mind around one big point.

Yes, whether its President Trump or President Harris – or indeed, yet still, a ‘Third Man’, non-gender specific – will be of huge importance, and impactful differentiation, to Americans, and to global geopolitics.

Yes, it’s further true, the world really could not afford four more years of Biden chaos; and the same goes for the now-alternative of ‘Kamala-as-Joe chaos’.

But that, or the return to the 2016-20 calmness of the Trump presidency, is not going to have that much differential impact on your financial state-of-play. down here in Aussie-land.

Vice president Kamala Harris who President Joe Biden has endorsed as the Democratic Party's new nominee.

That will remain largely a construct of the Fed and US rates, the RBA and our rates, and the unlimited, seemingly inexhaustible lunacy out of the worst collection of cabinet ministers under the most functionally incompetent PM we have ever had to endure.

You have to just basically ignore everything that is written about Donald Trump and his supposed likely presidency. Better still, don’t read it in the first place.

I am referring specifically to the media hysteria over what he’s supposedly going to do with the global trading system – sending the world into a 1930s-style deep freeze by slapping those huge tariffs on China’s exports to the US.

There are two counterfactuals.

The similar media hysteria over the Trump presidency 2016-20, and similar China tariffs, as contrasted with the outcome: beneficial for the US and beneficial for the global economy.

Is there a sane – or half-sentient – person today who looks back at the (Trump) years before Covid and says how ‘orrible they were?

The second is the reality of Trump himself.

If this is the time to have a wheeler-dealer businessman in the White House, and in global economic and financial terms it is, is there a better one than Trump?

Especially on his 2016-20 record?

Either way, it’s Trump plus the Fed, or Harris plus the Fed.

Originally published as Decisions made by the Federal Reserve not Trump or Harris will drive our economic future