I vaguely remember writing in an old financial diary on the day after Obama was elected and with the stock market collapsing. Today the market is up almost 3% and Trump is the president elect, again. I can’t help wondering what it would have been like if Obama, instead of saving the big banks, had nationalized them, punished their managers by, as much as possible, reducing them to penury, and if in the following years the average citizens had gotten the lion’s share of the country’s wealth creation instead of having it go to the finance bros. So does that make Obama or Trump the villian in this particular chapter of American history?

I have a lot of disorganized thoughts on this morning after, and this is the place for them, veen if I haven’t been here for a while. Clearly i have been laboring, for years, really for the entire period since i first learned the principles of investing, under a delusion. I believed the quaint ideas best described by Buffett. But by the time money making ideas trickle into the mainstream culture they are already mostly obsolete.

The truth, evidenced by all sorts of mundane observations and facts, is that we live in a speculator’s world, not the world of investors and workers. The country is all programmed for flipping, buy and sell, trading, and not at all for building and creating. Every minute on Bloomberg or CNBC someone is speculating verbally about which way interest rates and markets will move so the financial speculators can make bets.

The traders of old usually added value by journeying to some diastant land and returning with exotic goods. The traders of today simply exploit an opportunity provided by their elevated position, either insider knowledge, luck, or, almost always, wealth and the advantages it brings. A country of citizen slaves laboring under the delusion that hard work is the path to fortune and security keep the machine grinding forward as each passing year their own fortunes get more thin and the machine gradually consumes its own coolant oil, the heat from this self-combustion serving only to drive the contraption faster and force more space between those whose feet are on the ground pushing it along and those of top enjoying the ride and the view.

How long this lasts is anyone’s guess. Will it crumble of its own weight? Will Trump, recently hoisted to the drivers seat by the slaves reward them with better conditions or wil he steer it into a ditch?