Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of July 7, 2020

Article Excerpt

The relationship between China and the world’s democracies is at its lowest point in decades. How that relationship develops is likely to have an enormous impact on the stock market in coming years and decades, in a variety of ways. When China first began industrializing, many observers around the world saw it as a benign power that was headed for full-fledged democracy. As China’s economy grew, many of these observers began taking it for granted that China was the ascending power in the world, and that it would eventually overtake the U.S. That thought echoed predictions made about Soviet Russia a few decades earlier, which were still taken seriously into the 1980s. Instead of overtaking the U.S., however, Soviet Russia fell apart. Now Russia has the 12th biggest economy in the world. (To put that in perspective, Canada is #10 and Mexico is #15.) The U.S. is still #1. In 2019, it had an estimated population of 331 million people and GDP per…