Hillary clinton

In the final week of the US Presidential campaign, City Index explore how financial markets might react to Trump and Clinton in the White House. There is potential for significant market activity, especially if Trump secures a victory, as investors worry about an unpredictable president at the helm. We may see equity markets and the US dollar drop as investors put their investments into safe havens such as yen and gold. Over the longer term, Trump may lean towards a more hawkish FED and higher interest rates, which could lead to a stronger US dollar. This in turn may weigh on the price of gold. Clinton, on the other hand, is seen by Wall St as a safer pair of hands and is likely to favour a more neutral approach to US monetary policy.

Once upon a time Republicans routinely accused Democrats of being soft on Russia. Irving Kristol, writing in Commentary in 1952, famously allowed that Joseph McCarthy was a 'vulgar demagogue' but emphasised that 'there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.' It seems likely that the grand old man of neoconservatism might well rub his eyes in disbelief were he to observe the ideological somersault that has taken place in the 2016 presidential race.

If Hillary Clinton does somehow lose the 2016 US presidential election, FBI director James Comey might turn into one of the most hated people on earth — hated even more, perhaps, than the incoming Commander-in-Chief, Donald J Trump. Comey’s curious intervention against Mrs Clinton – in case you missed it, the FBI has announced that it is reviewing newly discovered emails that might be related to her notorious private server – will be seen as ‘the October surprise’ which rattled the Clinton campaign and handed momentum back to the Trump Train. Comey has already enraged senior Democrats.

Last night I sat at a dinner gala in New York and listened as Andrew Roberts—not only a distinguished historian but also a faithful friend of the US—asked the audience if 1776 wasn’t starting to look like a mistake. Politely as he could, he pointed out that our vaunted system had produced a corrupt, amoral drone queen to run against a bully and buffoon. Not having a musket ready to hand, I reached for my butter knife. As a red-blooded American, I would defend Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, any Yankee Doodle scoundrel you can name against a critic with a posh accent and a Savile suit. Today, though, it looks as though Roberts had a point.

If, on the night of Monday September 26, a US presidential election had been held instead of a televised debate, Donald Trump would likely now be America’s president-elect. That morning the reliable on-line poll analyst Nate Silver, sympathetic to Clinton, had tweeted, 'It’s a dead heat,' and then, a few minutes later, 'State firewall breaking up. Trend lines awful.' In retrospect, one simple task stood between Trump and the presidency: he had to look like some version of a rational human being. He failed. As Conrad Black has put it, the office of the presidency has been seeking Donald Trump. That night, Trump essentially picked up the phone and told the presidency it must have the wrong number. A classicist would call it a peripeteia. A sports fan would call it a choke.

Hillary Clinton is infinitely wiser than Donald Trump, or so we are lead to believe. You might think, then, that she and her clever campaign team would be wary of hubris. They should know better than to take victory for granted, and that excessive pride leads to a fall.   Well, they don’t. Clinton may have a seemingly unassailable lead in the polls. And yet Hillary, her staff, and the Democrats seem to be doing their damnedest to invite nemesis —in this case, a Donald Trump presidency — by showing off too soon, and putting off millions of American voters simply by being smug. They've ignored the great Texan proverb: ‘Don’t taunt the alligator until after you've crossed the creek.

Evan McMullin is running for president of the United States. A Mormon from Utah, a former CIA undercover agent, he represents what the Republican Party ought to look like this year but does not. Convinced, like many of his co-religionists, that Donald Trump is a disgrace, he speaks with quiet confidence about restoring dignity and respect to American conservatism. So far he’s on the ballot in just eleven states, and showing most strongly in the Rocky Mountains. He may actually win in the Mormon stronghold of Utah. He’s just forty years old and his running mate, Mindy Finn, a Jewish high-tech entrepreneur and conservative feminist, is only 36.

Did you think, after the second presidential TV debate last week, that democracy couldn’t sink lower? Well, think again. Tonight’s clash between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in Las Vegas — already dubbed ‘fight night’ — looks certain to mark a new low for civilised politics, and a new high for elections as trash entertainment. If you thought Trump and Clinton hurling insults about sex in the Townhall-style showdown in St Louis was grim, expect grimmer. If you thought Trump’s last pre-debate stunt of holding a press conference with the Clintons' sex victim ‘accusers’ was silly, expect sillier.

Speaking of which, who will be President Trump’s treasury secretary, and does it matter? After this week’s ‘locker-room’ revelations, the Donald’s odds of winning have clearly lengthened. But he ain’t out of the race yet — and seasoned Republicans of my acquaintance have been agonising for months over the question of whether to accept jobs in his White House team, or indeed whether to push themselves forward in the hope of influencing it towards sanity. Would that effort be worth the potential pain and embarrassment? It’s indicative of the lame-duck nature of Obama’s second term that Jack Lew, the Treasury incumbent and equivalent of our Chancellor, is all but invisible: I had to Google him to see what he looks like.