This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:
I had three personal goals going into this year’s Yahoo Finance Invest conference.
Goal one was to ensure all the passionate Yahoo Finance fans in the audience came away more knowledgeable about investing than when they arrived. Considering the event was standing room only the entire day and notepads were out, I think mission accomplished here.
The next goal was to cheer on the Yahoo Finance team of journalists interviewing titans of industry, as well as the incredible teams behind the scenes making the event come to life.
I lost my voice a little the day after (which you could probably hear in the above Opening Bid podcast from the next day), so mission accomplished here too.
And goal three —- wait for it — was to figure out why on earth movers and shakers in the world of business were so darn jazzed by another Trump presidency.
Why were they hitting the buy button on stocks that were already near records pre-Election Day? Why were they more bullish on the business of doing business today compared to outgoing president Joe Biden?
The president-elect has floated all sorts of potentially economically damaging policies, from stiff tariffs on China that run the risk of reigniting inflation to mass deportations that could severely upset supply chains.
The market moves we’ve seen since Nov. 5 border on nonsensical, especially in the wake of the interesting cast of characters being put forward by Trump to run key government agencies.
In the end, I got the answer to my question in two of my interviews: Apollo (APO) co-founder and CEO Marc Rowan (Disclosure: Yahoo Finance is owned by Apollo Global Management) and Bank of America (BAC) chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan. And the answer is this: The market has reasoned the billions of dollars the Biden administration pumped into the economy in areas such as infrastructure — which is only hitting now in a lot of cases — will be super-charged by looser regulations by Trump.
This, in effect, could be coined the Trumpian-Biden rally.
So the play appears to be buying possibly stronger-than-expected cash flows of companies today before the growth mushroom cloud appears down the line.
A few important comments:
Marc Rowan
“Look, this administration is coming in at a point in time where they really have an opportunity to pivot. Think about where the US is in the world. I mean, all the action is here. I mean, just recite what’s going on. The economy is in great shape, certainly relative to the other two large blocs of Europe and China. We have stimulated our economy over the past four years, and we’re about to get the dividend of that. I mean, we forget, three years ago, we passed almost $2 trillion for infrastructure. It’s all under construction.
