As a young Wall Street investor early in my career, I saw the now-infamous 1987 market crash coming.
Stock prices were trading at levels that were detached from reality, and I sensed an impending disaster. I moved quickly to get my clients out of the market, and they, in turn, were able to avoid this crash just two weeks before the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 22 percent in one day. In the many decades since that happened, I’ve made my living by continuing to analyze the information at hand, weighing the probability of how a certain event might play out, and making a recommendation.
In the wake of a highly contested election and the reprehensible breach of our Capitol in Washington, I’m often being asked what I think the future holds for America as a whole, and what we can do about it.
As I did in 1987, I’m going to tell it straight: The next two years are going to be tough for business and the economy.
The pro-business, pro-entrepreneurship, free-market policies that created one of the greatest economic surges in American history will be undone. Pro-regulation bureaucrats will tamper with free enterprise, and the ideas of identity politics will move from rhetoric to policymaking.
The continued pandemic-driven stimulus spending—coupled with the risk of renewed lockdowns—will surely lead to higher taxes. To boot, a highly overvalued stock market once again looks primed for a significant correction. That’s the short term.
Never Give Up
The “Curse of the Billy Goat” that was placed on the Chicago Cubs was the joke of Major League Baseball for decades. New baseball teams came and went. Some of them even won the World Series, while one of the original, and most legendary, franchises in the game continued as the perennial loser.Incredibly, each season, Cubs fans came back again and again and again, packing Wrigley Field to the gills, assuring each other “this is our year.” In 2003, it almost came true, with the Cubs on track to win it all, before their hopes were dashed again by what many consider a horribly bad call by an umpire on an errant play.
And yet, Cubs Nation came back, again and again, chanting “Wait till next year,” until finally winning it all in 2016.
Baseball imitates life, and we’re all dealing with the fact that the 2020 election—another contest in which many feel their candidate was treated unjustly—is over. We can argue it wasn’t fair, and may even discover down the road that, as with the Nixon–Kennedy race of 1960, there was real cheating, but it isn’t going to change the outcome.
However, if we throw in the towel right now, we’ll give our opponents exactly what they want, and we can absolutely guarantee that a freedom-oriented set of policies won’t win again.
Alternatively, we can get back on the field and spend the next two years planning, working hard, and advocating for what we believe within our respective spheres of influence. President Abraham Lincoln is often quoted as having said, “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe.” What you do now determines what happens to our country in the next 24 months.
Sure, we’ll take some blows, have some calls go against us, but we’ll be in there swinging, taking advantage of every opportunity to put runs on the board. And if you’re still tempted to quit, let me remind you: Americans don’t quit; it’s not in our DNA.
I live in New York and remember the morning of 9/11, the utter shock and heartbreak of my fellow New Yorkers. But through the tears, fears, and anxiety over the weeks that followed, I can’t remember running into one person on the streets of New York who was ready to throw in the towel.
On the contrary, New Yorkers from all walks of life set aside their differences and helped each other as Americans. We all encouraged each other, and made good on the promises to rebuild the World Trade Center even taller, and defeat al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden.
And that’s why it’s also important that we stick together now.
Most modern politicians think they’ll succeed by dividing us into groups that hate each other. Don’t fall for it.
Mark Geist is one of the heroes of Benghazi, Libya, who, with five others, saved the lives of 25 other Americans by holding off 500 terrorists for 13 hours. He told me that when they got word of the terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate, they didn’t stop to ask if the people in the compound were Republicans or Democrats.
They just knew that other Americans were in trouble and needed help.
Americans need to act like Americans again, stop fixating on Washington and instead focus on We the People. President Ronald Reagan said, “How can we love our country and not love our countrymen; and loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they’re sick, and provide opportunity to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory?”
Over the next two years, let’s stay in the game. We owe it to ourselves and to countless generations of Americans who’ve made great sacrifices to put us where we are. And it goes without saying that we must be able to look our kids in the eye and explain to them that we didn’t quit, we didn’t give up, and neither can they.
Wait till next year.