Here’s the bottom line. The economic cycle is aged, but that doesn’t mean it has to end anytime soon. That said, the fiscal policies of our new president will be met with many tradeoffs. One will be the potential positive of rising wages at the cost of lower corporate profit margins. Another will be a rising interest rate environment in the context of an economic and market construct that has been built on lower and lower rates over the past seven years. The behavior of an economy under a president is often policy driven for sure but many times it’s also just luck depending on what stage of the recovery we are in. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama got lucky as they caught the ends of recessions and ensuing expansions while George W. Bush, and possibly now Donald Trump, have caught the end of the cycle’s expansion and that means managing through a recession.
