Well, the pundits don’t like him.
The journalists apparently are terrified by him.
The commentators, depending on where you stand,
think he’s controversial or dangerous.
Donald Trump’s win sent stock market sky high.
The market loves him.
Will this trend continue,
or is it a case of what goes up must come down?
Let’s speak with Peta Tilse.
Peta Tilse is head of funds management at NatGen.
I spoke to Peta earlier this morning
and asked what the market reaction was
to the election of Mr. Trump.
Definitely, Steve.
It’s been a big sort of 24, 48 hours
since the election result, and Wall Street liked it.
So we saw stocks rally.
We saw the S&P 500 up about 2.4%
of sort of the day after the election,
and small caps specifically up 5.6%.
So that’s pretty big moves.
And then you’ve got things like Tesla
with Elon Musk being his number one fan, I guess.
So even just overnight, Tesla was up 3.6%,
but the last sort of five days, it’s up about 18.7%.
So huge moves.
I heard somewhere, forgive me,
I can’t quote the actual source,
but it was the biggest sort of post-election lift
in just so many years.
Apparently it was such a hugely positive response,
which is intriguing to me, Peta.
Tell me about Warren Buffett.
I hear that he sold a whole lot of stock
and may have been bruised.
I assume he was expecting a Trump loss.
So tell me the story.
Yeah, well, Warren Buffett, as we know,
considered one of the world’s best investors,
Berkshire Hathaway,
a huge global investor in a lot of brands that we know.
So Warren Buffett’s company has been a massive cash pile.
So they’ve been selling down Apple shares
and all sorts of things.
And they’ve amassed $325 billion worth of cash.
So he’s sitting on that.
Meanwhile, Tesla’s rallied 18% in the last five days.
So I don’t think he would have ever invest in Tesla,
but yeah, so it’s been a tricky market.
I’m sure Warren’s looking at a longer game here,
but yeah, there’s definitely some big moves.
And the US Federal Reserve has reportedly
or apparently made some sort of cut or adjustment
to their rates, to their cash rate.
What have they done?
Yeah, so this morning,
not the RBI, the Federal Reserve, I should say,
just came out and cut by 25 basis points.
It was kind of expected,
but I’m pretty sure Mr. Trump will try and claim that
as a victory on him.
And essentially, look,
they’ve sort of been winning the war on inflation
for the time being,
and their unemployment rate is similar to ours
at around about that sort of 4.1% level.
So the US economy is reasonably healthy,
and they can do these moves,
but it’ll be very interesting to see how that changes
over the course of the next sort of 12 months
once Trump gets inaugurated
in, I think it’s in January,
because a lot of his policies are very pro-America.
You think of in terms of him wanting to build walls
and do those kinds of things,
but there’s also gonna be lots of tax cuts,
corporate tax cuts,
which is part of the reason why Wall Street went bonkers,
and there’s also gonna be tariffs,
which is also supported for US-based businesses.
I mean, some of the tariffs that he’s been mooting
are like 60 to 200% on Chinese goods,
25% on Mexican goods,
and 10% on the rest of the world.
So if you’re an American company,
rely on cheap Chinese steel,
and it’s now gonna be 200% more expensive,
that’s gonna feed into inflation to the US consumers.
So it’s gonna be a very interesting period of time
that we’ll be going into.
Some other points tonight too is Europe
is probably just sitting and watching all of this
because they export a lot to the US,
and they’ve got their own sort of economic concerns
with a very slowing economy there.
So if they can’t export what they need to export,
then it’s gonna sort of mess up
their sort of economic picture even more in Europe.
So I think, yeah, we’re all in for a bit of a new paradigm.
And Fed has cut rates,
but will they continue as probably the next question?
I always think it’s fascinating
when this bloke gets elected,
it always upsets the establishment,
Apple cart, which is what I suspect
many of his supporters actually like anyhow.
So it’ll be fascinating to see how it plays out.
Peta Tilse, thank you very much for your time.
Once again, Peta.
Pleasure, Steve.