Monthly Archives: March 2025

Overreaction

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This is one such. The headline and subhead say it:

The Days of Set-and-Forget Investing Just Ended for Many Americans
President Trump’s economic policies are sending investors out of US stocks and into cash, bonds, gold and European defense stocks

The newswriters illustrate their claim with this anecdote:

For years, Yoram Ariely hadn’t touched most of his investments, preferring to ride the stock market’s ups and downs. Last Tuesday, he decided he had enough.
The 82-year-old unloaded almost half of his stock investments, fearful of the effects of President Trump’s economic agenda, and tariffs in particular. He may get rid of more still.
“The decisions are changing daily,” said Ariely, a retired business owner in Longboat Key, FL.

Therein lies the problem with this sort of reaction. Buy and hold—set and forget in newswriters’ lexicon—has always been a fine, if not flashy, way to build wealth when it’s done from a young age and continued through retirement/geezerdom. That includes riding through the ups and downs, including corrections and bear markets. Some investors, who change the stocks (and/or bonds, real estate, gold and silver with their reputation as inflation hedges, etc) occasionally (over weeks to months), will do better and others worse than buy and holders. Some traders, who change their vehicles on a more frequent basis, down through daily trades, also will do better and others worse. Slow but steady produces, over the long term, steady and favorable results, if without the flash and the heady rush.

And that’s the key: over the long term, which takes lots of patience and an emotional willingness to ride through the inevitable downturns, corrections, and bear markets, even more to add to holdings during those down turns. Worries about the disruptions and dislocations associated with President Donald Trump’s (R) economic and political moves are overblown in the sense that these are just another of those inevitable disruptions. Buy and hold remains a viable, middle of the road wealth building technique.

On the other hand, buy and hold has never been the right path for those of an age—those retired geezers—for whom there’s little time left in their lives in which, and reduced steady income with which, to recover from a sharp or relatively deep (or deep) market downturn. For those folks, preserving the wealth, the capital, that they have accumulated becomes more important than continuing to try to increase their wealth. The latter entails more risk than is optimal for those with shortening remaining life spans and reduced regular income.

Trump’s moves are just another of the disruptions inevitable in an investing environment; they present no reason for anyone to change their investing style.

Moral Bankruptcy of Some University Managers

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The Trump administration is investigating quite a number of universities over allegations of rampant antisemitism and discrimination generally infesting them. The managers of those institutions are upset, and with their upset, they’re demonstrating their blatant moral bankruptcy.

Administrators, professors and prospective students at major universities across the country are expressing concerns about the future of higher education as the Trump administration restricts funding for DEI and investigates schools for charges of antisemitism.
School officials “are in an impossible situation with facing the unknown as to what may happen down the road,” Ohio University alumni association board member Kim Barlag told The Wall Street Journal.

There’s nothing at all impossible about doing a right thing, nothing at all impossible about moving against the bigotry rampant at those institutions. Many of those institutions’ managers are just sulking and doing the academic equivalent of holding their breath until they turn blue. Typical is this from West Virginia University via its “spokesperson” April Kaull:

[O]ur nation’s research universities cannot maintain research programs essential for continued national prosperity [unless Federal research funding is continued].

This is cynical and disingenuous, and grown adults should know better than to throw a temper tantrum. It’s perfectly straightforward for university managers to do the things promised in those universities’ bragged about policies—free and unfettered enquiry, with freedom of speech and of academics. In fine, stop the antisemitic bigotry, cut out the discrimination on any basis other than plain academic talent and performance, expel those students who routinely violate those tenets, and fire those university personnel—including tenured professors—who violate those tenets. That just takes a modicum of moral courage.

Of course, I’m being generous to suggest these personages are morally bankrupt—that implies that they had morals to begin with. Condoning, or even merely accepting, bigotry—antisemitic, racial, sexist, whathaveyou—demonstrates a complete lack of moral sense.

Another Target for Reduction

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DoJ’s Civil Rights Division is, as ex-AG Eric Holder (D) once bragged, Justice’s “Crown Jewel.”

But that’s only because it’s populated with far-Left lawyers who grew up in the ACLU’s extremist creche. Indeed, as Hans von Spakovsky noted from his time in the division,

Nearly all the career lawyers come from liberal advocacy groups, and all carry in the mindset: “I can do exactly what I was doing for the ACLU, only now with the power of government behind me.”

The division is infamous for its resistance to authority other than its own, which it coalesced out of the æther:

…resistance to direction, even direct orders. Career attorneys refuse to work on cases with which they disagree. Others mulishly take part with the goal of misleading superiors on legal questions or sabotaging cases. Lawyers send letters, make threats or initiate proceedings without sign-off from leadership.

These are bureaucrats who’ve self-selected for RIF as part of the initial round of reduction in personnel. Following that initial culling, the division would benefit, and so would DoJ and more broadly us average American citizens, from a much broader and deeper RIF of personnel and concomitant elimination of all of those job slots.

Here’s hoping Harmeet Dhillon is confirmed and she gets the backing she needs. That reduction in personnel job slots is the first step in quelling the naked revolt in the division and bringing it back under control.

A Modest Proposal

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The Wall Street Journal editors (I seem to have been picking on them lately…) have a modest proposal regarding student debt and forgiveness.

Congress created the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program in 2007. It lets borrowers who work for government or tax-exempt organizations get unpaid debt forgiven after 10 years of payments. Its supposed goal was to help government and nonprofit employers compete with private businesses that can pay more.

The editors correctly note that in the years since its inception, the program has become badly abused and used to reward[] a politically favored group of workers and can make it harder for private businesses to compete. Based on that, the editors recommend the Republican-majority houses of Congress repeal the program altogether.

They’re correct in that, but I’d go a ways farther. Congress should make student loan relief available through our existing bankruptcy laws. Additionally (critically additionally), Congress should take the Federal government out of the student loan business altogether: no more Federal government student loans and no more Federal government guarantees of other lenders’ student loans.

And one more step: require colleges (including junior and community colleges) and universities and trade schools to publish the regionally average salaries and wages for each major the school offers or each trade certification program the trade school offers at the five-years employed mark. Associated with that, those schools should be required to be the ones extending the student loans or be either co-signers or guarantors of other lenders’ loans to their students.

Without the ability to hide behind Other People’s Money in the form of purely third party or Government loans, the abuses likely would screech to a halt.

Why Would They Want To?

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The lede says it all, even if the article is a bit dated now.

The leader of Senate Democrats moved to take the threat of a government shutdown off the table, following a grueling intraparty fight in which lawmakers struggled with how best to resist President Trump’s fast-paced efforts to slim down federal agencies.

Why would the Progressive-Democratic Party object to slimming Federal agencies and making them more efficient?

Oh, wait—this is the Party that insists Government knows better than us poor, benighted and ignorant average Americans, and that the way to make Government more efficient is to grow it in both financial and physical size and give it more control over our lives.