Despite assurances of a postpartisan presidency four years ago, President Obama was re-elected after a contentious (and, until Tuesday, close) campaign—the most divided since Kennedy battled Nixon roughly 50 years earlier. The sentiment holds for the advisor industry, if comments by a number of high-profile personalities are any indication.
"Mr. Obama is a disaster for business and a disaster for the United States," Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, told Bloomberg Television on Wednesday, noting he thought the market would react with a "drop of at least 50%" on news of the president's re-election.
Faber also said "I doubt [Obama] will stay at the presidency for another four years. I think there will be so many scandals" and that investors should "buy themselves a machine gun."
"Not that Mr. Romney would be much better," Faber conceded, "but the Republicans understand the problem of excessive debt better than Mr. Obama, who basically doesn't care about piling up debt. You also have in the background Mr. [Federal Reserve Chairman] Bernanke, who with artificially low interest rates enables the debt to essentially escalate endlessly."
Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital and author of The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy, levied more tempered, if no less direct, comments on The Breakout website on Wednesday.
"No," was Schiff's blunt response when asked if the country was on track to be better off four years from now.
"If Obama thinks that Bush dealt him a weak hand, wait until we see how much weaker the hand is going to be that Obama deals his successor," Schiff said. "We're going to be in much worse shape."
How so? By Schiff's calculations, "the stock market is correct in going down" today since he says higher taxes on companies (at the corporate and/or individual level) makes those companies less valuable, according to the website.
Being deeper in debt is another of his predictions, according to the interview, and he expects the country will be at $20 trillion in a couple of years, and going higher from there.
"In 2009, after-tax take home pay bottomed at around $6 trillion annually," Biderman (left) said on the TrimTabs Money Blog on Wednesday. "Take-home pay has risen about 3% to 4% per year nominally since then. However, after inflation take home-pay has grown all of 1% or so. In other words, since Obama has been president, after-tax take-home for everyone who pays taxes is still down by about 5% nominally and more than 10% after inflation."
