Hedge Fund CIO: Trump Is Now Left With Two Darker Options – A Domestic Civil Conflict And/Or A Chinese Conflict

Authored by Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

“We’re not close to knowing how this election goes down,” said the CIO, Nov 3rd just 114 days away. “Trump’s hope to rely on a robust recovery took a major blow this week,” he continued, the nation hitting successive daily record infections, economic activity slowing. “And that leaves two darker options; a domestic civil conflict and/or a Chinese conflict.”

The only thing uniting Americans is a belief that China is an adversary. Now Bannon says we’re building a case that Covid was caused by a lab leak. “Trump just chose to double down on a culture war.”

“Will civil conflict rise to a level where it justifies a powerful military intervention to restore order?” asked the same CIO. “Will this allow Trump to position himself as civil society’s defender and paint Biden as an anarchy advocate?” he asked.

“My instinct is yes, but only if the images of chaos are so bad that they shake suburbanites to their core,” he said. “If that fails, there’s always China, perhaps those cards can be played together.” And in the distance, Biden laid low, playing a cautious hand, his teleprompters compensating for cognitive decline.

“So if those are the obvious cards, what are the others?” continued the CIO. “Throw Pence under the bus for failing to deal with Covid-19 and replace him with Nikki Haley?” The Indian-American former South Carolina governor, UN Ambassador, would be America’s first female VP and a credible 2024 presidential candidate.

“Beyond that there are wildcards like Kanye and his latest stunt. Nefarious stuff like voter suppression. The left could overplay its hand and somehow blow itself up, but it’s hard to paint Biden as a revolutionary.”

PredictIt.com allows you to bet on politics. It’s imperfect, inefficient, but tradeable. The probability of Dems winning the presidency trade at 64%. Dem’s odds of winning the key four states Trump won in 2016 by less than 2% of the vote (and Obama won in 2012) are as follows: Florida 62% probability of Dems winning presidency, Pennsylvania 71%, Wisconsin 71%, and Michigan 76%. The odds of Dems winning a clean sweep (presidency, senate, house) is 56%. And the odds of Kanye West running for president spiked to 47% on July 4th and are now 22%.