2016 Nov 7^th

Back to politics…and not a moment too soon! The signs and portents are that a blowout is coming.

First off, the stock market is up over 300 points at 2 PM as I write this.  It had been moribund and slowly sinking when it looked like Trump was closing the gap. The market does not like uncertainty and it despises Donald Trump.

Comey, the beleaguered FBI chief, has declared that the newly discovered cache of 650,000 emails has been reviewed and there is no there there. Trump accuses Comey of skullduggery because all of those 650,000 emails could not possibly have been reviewed this quickly. They can be, given certain algorithms to assist the process. Of course why this review wasn’t done before Comey made his initial announcement is known only to Comey…and possibly not even to him. It will take the vaunted FBI some time and much propaganda to recover from this goof.

Trump has recently agreed to allow one of his surrogates to monitor what he sends out on his Twitter account. Say what? The President was quick to point out that if his staff can’t trust him with Twitter why should we trust him with the nuclear codes. What a monumental screw-up for the Trump people. This was reported by the New York Times on Sunday so of course the Trump people are screaming “lies, all lies.” What else can they do? Trump’s tweets have suddenly become much tamer than they had been.

His staff must have assumed that this would become public and if it did it would be lovely ammunition for the Clinton camp…but they went with it anyway. What could Trump have twittered in the 48 hours before the election that could possibly have damaged him as much as having his staff treat him like a ten year old who writes naughty words on fences?

There is also a change in the betting odds offered by Paddy Power, the Brits betting parlour that offers odds on most anything including our presidential election. On November 1^st  Paddy Power’ odds on Clinton winning the election were 4/11, meaning that you risked 11 dollars to bet on a Clinton win and if you were right you’d be five dollars richer. That was then, now the odds have changed. Previously the odds were 36.3 percent chance of a Trump win, now a five dollar bet on Hillary Clinton will net you just one dollar if you’re right; in short the odds of a Trump win have declined from 36 per cent to just 20 percent.