As Election Day approaches, the stakes are higher than ever as Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump make their final efforts in key battleground states. Among those closely monitoring the race is Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel and a prominent Republican donor, who is now predicting that Trump will return to the White House.
“The expectation today is that Donald Trump will win the White House in just a few days; we will know shortly,” Griffin commented during a panel discussion at the Future Investment Initiative in Saudi Arabia. “We are at that moment of peak uncertainty. It is a race that Trump is favored to win but it is almost a coin toss,” he said according to Bloomberg. Griffin mentioned during the forum that the outcome of the presidential race is anticipated to provide more clarity to the markets.
“Big picture, the reduction in uncertainty is almost always positive for asset prices. I would say that post-election will generally see a risk … as people come to adopt a new regime, whether it’s a Harris regime or a Trump regime,” said Griffin. “This uncertainty will be behind us.” He noted that other economists feel similarly.
“The biggest read-through for the election results into consumer spending in the future really has more to do with taxes than sentiment because we are going to have this big rewrite of the tax code into 2026,” Jefferies senior US economist Thomas Simons told Yahoo Finance. Simons is a Senior U.S. Economist at Jefferies, a global investment banking firm. He joined Jefferies in September 2009 as a Money Market Economist.
Concerns about tax adjustments “could end up impacting consumer spending if the Democrats do well. And then there’s this concern that most of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is going to be reversed, or there’s going to be additional taxes on upper-income, wealthier households. They’ve been the ones that have been driving the overall spending numbers to this point,” he noted further clarifying that “taking away some positive wealth effect… then there is a risk that consumer spending might slow.”
He concluded: “We have seen essentially since 2016 that there is this sort of zig-zag seesaw pattern of when the Republicans are in office or are doing well in polls, the Republican sentiment goes to the moon, and Democrats go into the basement and literally vice versa.”
Finance expert and famed investor Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” sounded the alarm on Harris’ dark rhetoric in the final days of her campaign before the Nov. 5 election and questioned why there is so little information available about some of her economic policies, a situation he described as “nuts.”
“I don’t care what she eats for breakfast. I’m still trying to figure out why she wants to raise taxes at 28%, why she wants to go after unrealized capital gains. What about the $25,000 inflation idea for houses? That’s nuts,” O’Leary told Fox News host Jesse Watters on Tuesday. “All of this policy stuff got lost in this crazy narrative, this circus going on right now. I’m telling you, as an investor, I’m getting freaked out here because there’s no information anymore. It’s just this crazy rhetoric going in the last days.
“I would think she should do the Rogan deal and start talking about what she really means. Price gouging on grocery stores at 3.5% margin? I mean, 88 percent of jobs in America come from companies, not the government. Am I the only guy that cares about this? This is nuts. It’s completely nuts. I’m just throwing my hand up saying she’s got six or seven days left. Please tell me what you want to do because I have no idea. I have no idea what you’re doing. No idea,” he added.
Disclaimer: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.