Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of May 10, 2016

Article Excerpt

This past week, after Ted Cruz and John Kasich dropped out of the race for the Republican Presidential nomination, the media began referring to the “Trump ascendancy.” Use of the phrase has since exploded. Google comes up with 374,000 hits for it. (In contrast, Google only finds 289 results in a search for “Romney ascendancy.”) The term seems to reflect a widely shared, negative point of view. “Ascendancy” started out as a reference to the rise to power in Ireland by a coalition of Protestant landowners, clergy and professionals, starting in the 1600s. Most historians would agree that the “Protestant Ascendancy” helped bring on a long stretch of poverty, mass emigration and intermittent starvation for the Irish. Judging by results of the Google search, the widely shared view about the Trump ascendancy is that it could be an awful thing for the economy and stock market. I bring this up because I see it as one more example of an orthodoxy…