Month: April 2017

Day 100 of the Trump presidency is on Saturday.  The media was full of reports this week about the (non) accomplishments of President Trump, but his supporters remain optimistic that he will bring about significant changes.   The only really significant item is the appointment of a conservative US Supreme Court Justice – one for which Republicans in the senate had to change the rules so that Justice Neil Gorsuch could be appointed by a simple majority (under the old rules a 60-40 majority was needed).

As for legislation, there were the failed attempts at overhauling Obamacare, the one page ‘tax reform’ (really a tax cut for the rich), and really no proposal about badly needed infrastructure repairs other than that border wall with Mexico (which none of the border States want, by the way).   Finally, let’s not forget the head-snapping policy reversals, too many to recall – NATO being obsolete and then no longer, the USA withdrawing from NAFTA and then not, declaring China a currency manipulator and then not; the list goes on.

Thursday was a big day for the earnings reports of technology companies, with Alphabet (parent company of Google), Amazon, Intel and Microsoft reporting earnings. (Apple and Facebook will report next week).

The share prices of both Alphabet ($908 as of Friday) and Amazon ($927 as of Friday) are now approaching $1,000.  Will that happen this year?  Time will tell. (Right now the US economy is only growing at 0.7%.  Most economists say it would have to achieve 2% growth to drive the stock market higher by year end).

‘A laughable stunt by a gang of plutocrats looking to enrich themselves at the expense of the country’s future’ .. says the New York Times of President Trump’s ‘tax plan’ outlined by his top lieutenants Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn (both multimillionaires and former Goldman Sachs bankers).

I could not agree more.  The seven points from the proposal (on the right) are from the New York Times. Broadly speaking (more details are needed), all the tax cuts will add anything from $2 trillion to $7 trillion in additional debt over the first 10 years. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump said he would get rid of the $20 trillion national debt in 8 years – perhaps the most stratospherically unattainable boast of all he has made, ever.

So yes – all this nonsense from a President that has refused to release his own tax forms, that has appointed his son-in-law and daughter to White House positions, with their world-wide business interests intact, and that has not even tried to put his own businesses at arm’s length to the presidency.

The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson was in the news this month : part of a miscommunication between the White House and the United States Armed Forces.   A few days after President Trump stated that it was part of an armada steaming* to the Korean peninsula, the US navy published pictures picked up by the New York Times, that showed it was in fact going in the opposite direction.   South Korea was not impressed. Said a Yonhap news agency headline: Trump’s armada gaffe stains his commitment to the alliance.

(Update: On Wednesday April 26, Navy Adm. Harry Harris, the four-star commander of U.S. Pacific Command, testified at a hearing of the House Committee on Armed Services that he was to blame for the miscommunication).

*I love the word ‘steaming’, quaint word and old-fashioned as it is. Nimitz-class carriers are in fact nuclear-powered. There are ten of these supercarriers in service in the United States Navy.

It’s nice to see that independent candidate and centrist Emmanuel Macron came out on top of the final polls in today’s French election .. even though it’s unsettling that anti-EU, anti-immigration candidate Marine Le Pen still has a shot at winning in the final round, on May 7.

The pre-election polling turned out to be accurate, though, and one has to believe that most voters will coalesce around Macron in the final round.  En marche! (Forward!)

‘We Kill the World (Don’t Kill the World)’ from German pop group Boney M. was a No 1 hit song in South Africa in 1981.
It was Earth Day today, I thought of the song, and looked up the words again.

P.S. Check out astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s four-minute Facebook video on the history and current state of science in America. ‘Science is a fundamental part of the country that we are’.

For the first time since 1979, people in the continental United States will be able to see a total solar eclipse later this year, on Monday August 21. The sun is 400 times larger in diameter than Earth’s moon, but since the moon is 400 times closer than the sun, they appear to be the same size in the heavens.

I read on the Great American Eclipse website that the moon is actually moving away from Earth by about one inch a year.  That means that in a distant epoch, humans will run out of total solar eclipses to view, and only see annular eclipses (a ring of sun around the moon).

IMPORTANT NOTE (especially to humans in positions of great power):
Let us not destroy Earth before then with thermonuclear war, or by continuing the burning of fossil fuels for the generation of energy.

I finally gave up trying to order a 2017 South African silver Krugerrand directly from the South African Mint, and used a local coin importer instead.

My silver Krugerrand arrived in the mail today, allowing me to check it out up close with my magnifier.

I love to ‘inspect’ coins – and stamps – from up close, and to see all the fine detail.

April 15 is Tax Day in the United States (the day by which the prior calendar year’s taxes need to be filed).  Since April 15 falls on a Saturday this year and Easter Monday, procrastinators have until Tuesday April 18 to file their taxes.

There were protests in some cities, demanding that President Trump release his tax returns. In a tweet, Trump called the protests ‘small organized rallies ‘and ‘that someone should look into them’.  (Which elicited a storm of responses, of course. The honest truth is that someone should look into the tax returns of the President –  to determine all the multiple conflicts of interest between his business interests and his holding office as President of the United States, while also having his family members on the White House staff).

North Korea has conducted 5 nuclear tests the last decade, and all signs point to a sixth test this weekend.  (This April 15 marks the 105th birth anniversary of Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s founder). The New York Times points out in an article with a lot of technical detail, that the North’s detonations generate shock waves that register around the globe. Mount Mantap is the only active nuclear testing site in the world.   China is reportedly exerting a lot of pressure on North Korea (Kim Jong-un), trying to dissuade him from going ahead and escalating the tensions further.   ‘If China does not take care of it, the USA will’ declared President Trump.   But surely, analysts say, that cannot mean a pre-emptive attack on the nuclear facilities in North Korea.   And South Korea would have to sign off on any military action, given that Seoul is just across the border.

The Wall Street Journal reports that new data show that 82% of actively managed U.S. mutual funds trailed their respective benchmarks, even over 15 years (previous studies were for shorter time periods).  ‘The debate over whether passive management is as good or better than active management is a long-running and contentious one, but it has heated up in recent years. Active managers’ struggles to beat the market over recent years amid a long-term bull market in stocks have resulted in fee pressure, fund closings, business overhauls and mergers.
Investors have spoken with their wallets, turning to index-tracking funds in droves. Some $1.2 trillion has been withdrawn from actively managed U.S. stock funds since the start of 2007 through March, according to Morningstar Inc. Nearly the same amount, $1.1 trillion, has moved into passive U.S. stock funds over the same period’.

I see in the comments section that some readers say that this analysis is too simple. It ignores risk, and that one index fund does not make for a diversified portfolio.

On Tuesday, Trump spokesman Sean Spicer condemned the Syria attack with chemical weapons (of last week) in a press briefing in the White House by saying ‘not even Adolf Hitler had sunk so far as to use chemical weapons against his own population’.  This is such a historically incorrect claim, that journalists in the room threw him a lifeline (‘What did you mean by that?’), but his muddled response only ended up making matters worse.

By the end of Tuesday he had to issue a written clarification, and had to correct that clarification twice, as well.   And finally, he went on live television one more time, and apologize.  As one cable news commentator said : at least the apology was unconditional.  Not one of those apologies that start with ‘If I offended anyone, I apologize .. ‘.