A business or an investment fund is simply a betting pool for people who have coin or credit. The bet represents all the information that the investor has acquired over some period and the dollar amount of her bet represents the minimum cost of the information acquired. This means that the actual cost of creating the investment fund, asset, or business means nothing to the investor.
All that matters is an outcome that recovers her cost for accumulating information that helps her determine whether her preferred outcome-a return of and on her capital-will be realized. Information on sunk costs mean nothing to her (much to the chagrin of the run-of-the-mill economist).
For information traders entering information markets what should matter is providing information that addresses existential threats to profits and revenues. The information trader must have awareness of the outcome the investor is interested in.
Investors watching political markets are interested in whether a decision poses an existential threat to a firm or a firm’s profits or revenues. Existential threats posed by government come in the form of a revocation of a license, denial of access to natural resources, or denial of access to financial capital. The investor wants to know the likelihood of the occurrence of these events.
In hind sight this is why the Trump Effect became vacuous. The expectations surrounding the Trump administration’s impact on investment never took into account government’s prime operational mandate which is to exploit the natural environment of a physical area. It does this by managing the extraction of resources from that physical area. In the case of American government, it has determined that extraction would best be carried out by a private sector driven by a profit motive.
Businesses provide efficient methods for extracting resources and converting the resources into “taxable events” i.e. goods and services for sale. Businesses convert human resources into taxable events by employing labor thus making humans available for taxation by government.
The subsequent uncertainty experienced by the financial markets post Mr Trump’s inauguration was the result of investors listening to the “emotional marketing” of the 2016 campaign. Rhetoric regarding bringing back manufacturing jobs into a political economy that favors information as its primary resource or building more bridges to nowhere via infrastructure knowing that the multiplier effect is limited by a project’s termination date was baseless but pulled on enough heartstrings of investors that they forgot or were forced to overlook even further government’s prime mission.
Also, the financial markets can’t risk forgetting that the U.S. is a federal system and states have to be considered when assessing the American economy. States have to be on board with any policies that address contraction or expansion of licensing or access to natural resources. For example, it is one thing for the federal government to increase access to radio frequencies by mobile telephone companies. But if the states do not put in place rights-of-way policies that allow mobile phone companies to deploy tower facilities, then having a license to transmit wireless signals is meaningless and the firm faces a scenario of less revenues.
When discerning what information matters, the focus should be on political information that threatens the continued existence of a firm or threats to its revenues and profits. Investors need to discern between the emotional or campaign marketing noise and substantive political intelligence that addresses a firm’s existence.
