How does America present itself at the spost-Obama time? “However it turns out, many things have changed compared to the traditional framework. By now the clash is not between Republicans and Democrats, but between populists and non-populists. Or, if you prefer, between winners and losers in the context of the global economy”. Nouriel Roubini, the famous "mister Doom" who deserves credit for having anticipated the risks of the financial crisis of 2008/09, stopped off in Milan as a guest of the Global Thinking Foundation, foundation born in 2016 on the initiative of Claudia Segre with the mission of promoting financial education. An exceptional testimonial for Milanese finance to which he owes a lot: he's here in Bocconi that the current professor of Stern University took the first steps in the “sad science”. “My grandfather – says the high school student awarded for the occasion for having won a competition for budding entrepreneurs – was his teacher. It was he who told him: don't stop here, Italy is too small for you”. And since then Roubini has been monitoring, often successfully, the fate of the global economy.
Who will win between Clinton and Trump? “Obviously I don't know. Hillary Clinton is the continuity candidate in the eyes of the markets. Your first concern, in case of victory, will be to refine the objectives of the policy pursued by Barack Obama. In short, a sort of fine tuning”. And Donald Trump? “His is the image of the disruptor, in all honesty I don't feel like making predictions about Trump as president: he could, as happened with Ronald Reagan at the time, adapt to the rules and government mechanisms that condition freedom of movement of the president. Or play his role in a radical way, as his electoral campaign suggests ”. In summary, the impact of a Hillary Clinton victory promises to be soft. More music for Trump. “With Clinton's victory we will have stability in domestic and foreign policies. While for Trump's radical statements on immigration, trade agreements, foreign policy rates, there could be a sharp correction on the American stock market, followed by a fall in the dollar and economic and geopolitical uncertainty not only in the United States but throughout the world " .
After the first impact, however, the path of President Clinton, the most accredited for success according to the polls, looms more contrasted than one imagines. “The new president will have to act in an extremely complex international framework. To cite one example, climate change is posing us epochal problems with unprecedented implications. Let us take the case of immigration. Drought is the first cause of the movement of populations, already 15-20 million globally. Water was the trigger for the war in Syria. In this context, protectionism, a close relative of populism, could have dangerous consequences”. There is not only the wall that Donald Trump promises. It is not known with what degree of seriousness, between the USA and Mexico. Even Hillary Clinton, under pressure from the electorate, has already taken steps back on the road to trade agreements, starting with the TTIP. “Populist forces are organizing at the political level. There is not only Trump. In the democratic field, the wing represented by has great weight Bernie Sanders”. This sentiment could translate into greater difficulties (and less funding) for the digital economy and other fields that promise the fastest rates of development, in favor of the immediate needs of the blue collars, victims of globalization. “The Clinton administration will focus on an extraordinary plan for infrastructure which will require a demanding fiscal policy, in the order of tens of billions of dollars. But he will have to deal with the hostility of Congress, probably still majority Republican. Without neglecting the role that investigations into the Clinton Foundation or e-mails could have. It is foreseeable that Paul Ryan's race to forget the Republican challenger for the White House in 2020 will begin immediately. It is inevitable that political tension will continue to be very high". And this could (should) weigh on the growth of the real economy and the stock market, which cannot yet rely heavily on monetary policy.
