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No, impeachment will not crash the stock market

https://www.politico.com/amp/story/2018/08/23/donald-trump-impeachment-stock-market-economy-750277

NEW YORK— The longest bull market run in American history could get killed off by a financial collapse in Turkey, a policy mistake by the Federal Reserve or a plain old economic recession.

It will probably not be slain by an impeachment of President Donald Trump.

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That’s the consensus view of Wall Street traders and money managers, who say that while an ugly impeachment fight might cause temporary volatility, markets could easily survive an impeachment and even the unlikely event that Trump is removed from office in a Senate trial.

In fact, Wall Street pros often talk about a potential relief rally if Trump departs the White House early.

The underlying economy would remain strong, and a hypothetical President Mike Pence would likely continue Trump’s policy of low taxes and fewer regulations without all the wild tweeting and investigations and persistent trade wars.

“I’m not sure the market would be all that upset by Trump being forced to leave,” said Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at the Leuthold Group. “Many Republicans might welcome it, and if Pence moves in, the basic low regulation, low tax nature of the presidency would be the same, only without the constant self-induced volatility, and maybe ‘trade wars' would diminish.”

Trump took a very different view in an interview with Fox News that aired Thursday morning, saying the stock market likely would collapse if he were impeached.

“I will tell you what, if I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor,” he said, amid new legal turmoil this week with two former advisers, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, now guilty of criminal acts.

Trump loves to bask in the stock market advance under his presidency and boasted this week about the length of the bull market. And stocks have indeed celebrated his policies on taxes and regulation.

But markets now move very little on news of fresh legal trouble for Trump. And analysts say that’s in part because the economic and stock market recoveries long predate Trump’s presidency and would probably live on without him.

“Fading trade wars, no change in corporate taxes and the deregulatory air in Washington would be something of a ‘Washington Goldilocks’ situation,” Michael Obuchowski, portfolio manager at Merlin Asset Management, said of a potential impeachment.

When Wall Street analysts list risks to the current market, they most often cite external turmoil, such as the currency crisis that recently rocked Turkey or the Fed moving too fast — or too slow — on interest rates. Geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and the Korean Peninsula also show up as potential destroyers of a bull market born in the ash heap of the 2009 financial crisis.

They sometimes cite political uncertainty surrounding Trump, but that is usually couched as the potential for trade wars and other unpredictable policies, not the threat of his removal.

Wall Street analysts generally agree that a protracted impeachment fight and potential Senate trial could weigh on stocks, giving Trump the opportunity to claim vindication for his market crash prediction. But they say any drop on Wall Street would be based on the uncertainty of the outcome of such a fight rather than real fear of a post-Trump presidency.

Stefanie Miller, a senior analyst at Height Capital Markets in Washington, said investors would be unnerved by any impeachment effort because of the instability that would bring.

"I do NOT think the market will shrug off impeachment proceedings in the House, even if they don’t lead to a conviction in the Senate," she said in an email. "Based on frequent conversations I’ve had with investors, I don’t get a sense that many would welcome the instability/headline risk stemming from those proceedings."

A larger concern among some investors is that Trump survives but Republicans are so damaged by him that they lose both the House and Senate, putting market-friendly policies more at risk.

“If the scandal helps both the House and Senate to go Democrat to a point where they could reverse tax or regulatory policies, that would matter to the markets,” Paulsen said. “But this seems unlikely, and even if both go Democrat it would mean gridlock for Trump’s term, not much different.”

Men take care of their spouses just as well as women (new research suggests)

http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-08-10-men-take-care-their-spouses-just-well-women-new-research-suggests#

Men respond to their spouse’s illness just as much as women do and as a result are better caregivers in later life than previous research suggests, according to a new Oxford University collaboration.

The study, published in Journals of Gerontology, Series B, is good news for our increasingly stretched adult care services, which have become more reliant on patients’ family and spouses for support. Conducted with peers from the University of Pennsylvania, the research sits in contrast to previous studies on spousal caregiving, which found that female caregivers tend to be more responsive. However, the new results reveal that men are just as responsive to a partner’s illness, as women.

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, the research carried out by Dr Langner of Oxford University* and Professor Frank Furstenberg of the University of Pennsylvania**, focused on 538 couples in Germany with an average age of 69, where one of them had developed the need for spousal care, between 2001-2015, and looked at how caregivers adjusted their hours in response to the new care need: whether directly responding to their physical needs or performing errands and housework.

The findings show that men increased their care hours as much as women did, resulting in similar levels of care once their partner became ill. These similarities were particularly pronounced when a spouse was deemed severely ill, when there was little to no difference in the level of care given.

Perhaps surprisingly, when their spouse is severely ill, men also increase the time they spend on housework and errands, more than women. However, at lower levels of spousal care need – when a spouse is only slightly unwell, women still spend more time doing housework and errands than men – because they already did more housework and errands prior to the disease onset.

There were also significant differences in levels of care given, for couples where the spouse was only unofficially seen to be ‘in need of care’. However, these differences disappeared in homes where no other household help was provided, when regardless of gender, male or female, spouses stepped up to care for each other.

Dr Laura Langner, Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford and ESRC Future Research Leader, said: ‘Our results suggest that gender differences in spousal caregiving in old age are not as pronounced as previously thought. Past studies had numerous limitations, which we could overcome with our data.

‘We found that, unlike many previous studies on caregiving in later life – male caregivers were just as responsive towards their partner’s onset of illness as female caregivers. This stands in sharp contrast the division of caregiving (i.e. childcare) and housework in mid-life. There could be a number of reasons for this, but a key factor may be that in later life many people retire and no longer have the responsibility of work, so are able to focus on other priorities – that their spouse may have been doing already.’

Discussing the potential future implications of the research for patients and services, she adds: ‘People are living longer, meaning that we have an increasingly dependent aging population and we face an elderly care cost problem. Reforms are likely to continue reducing more expensive institutionalised care, and increase cheaper home care. With the gender gap in life expectancy closing, and children becoming less available to care for their parents, it is likely that many more men will be called upon to care for their partners. But, our findings at least suggest that women won’t have to worry that their partners are not up to the job of caring for them, should they need to.’

The team intend to build on the findings by applying the research approach to other countries and assessing how the results compare.