I don't claim to be especially "savvy"-- but with more than a third of the market value held "passively" (meaning investors in indexed funds), a lot of people have traded voting with their feet for a sense of security. Thus, there isn't actually a lot of pressure in the stock market reservoir to bubble back up to the Beltway. After reading yesterday's HN topic: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-stock-valuations-havent-... and the accompanying paper from Grantham, Mayo & van Oterloo: https://www.gmo.com/docs/default-source/research-and-comment...

...my pithy summary would be "Winter is coming."

To the extent a repatriation tax holiday is the right thing to do, it should be possible to make that case in a traditional political environment where the legislators and executive are at least somewhat qualified to deal with it.

Meanwhile, the abrogation of informed authority is leading to scenarios like this: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/department-of-energy...

How healthy will it be for Wall Street (or anyone else on the West Coast) if the DoE is defunded to the point where they take their eye off the ball at Hanford?

Basically, what I'm asking is this: the markets love Trump. Why aren't the risks associated with gross incompetence priced in? I'm missing something, obviously, and that bugs me.

A libertarian economist would say:

"Externalities are only bad when the island runs out of trees to chop down, canneries runs out of sardines to can and planet runs out of fossil fuels dig up."

Or when Wal-Mart runs out of cheap Chinese junk...