The Investment Scientist

Since the election, the US stock market has been breaking new highs, encouraged by the prospect of lower taxes and higher growth. However I believe investors have not paid sufficient attention to the prospect of a trade war.

To a large extent, the election of Donald Trump is a repudiation of globalization by a large segment of the US electorate. Even though the country as a whole has benefited tremendously from globalization, those benefits have by and large bypassed working-class folks.

Before 2000,  Apple made all of its computers in the US and its market cap never rose about 10 billion dollars. Since then, Apple has subcontracted all of its production overseas and only kept design and marketing in US soil. The result?

Apple has become the most valuable company in the world with a market cap of over $600 billion even though they only have 66,000 employees in the US.

At the same time, Apple’s contract manufacturer Foxconn directly employs over 1 million workers in China. The supply chain to Foxconn employs another two million people. Read the rest of this entry »

1. I went to San Francisco to study improvised musical theater and performed at the Bay Front Theater for a 45 minute set of musical story entirely improvised on stage.
2. Against all odds, I kept Storyfest Short Slam, a short storytelling contest, alive and strong at the Bethesda Writer’s Center.
3. I visited my English teacher whom I had lost touch with for 30 years. I couldn’t have accomplished this much in the US without him. I went to say thank you to him personally. I went to Guangzhou for my high school reunion and took pictures with my female classmates for the first time. (Back then we didn’t hang out with the opposite sex.) 
4. At Leadership Montgomery homecoming, I acted out Michael Jackson. Read the rest of this entry »