I don't know about you but I just don't get it. I don't know what magic wand they think that this guy's got. I don't think there's any ever been a case of a president having more people that hate his guts and want to kill him than Donald Trump. I don’t know how he’s going to be successful at all these things. What do you think about all of this bullishness that's out there?
Raoul: You need to separate out what they truly believe is going to happen to the U.S. economy going forwards or what they think the market is going to perceive to happen and to trade the opportunity that's what they’re very good at.
So they may think that deflation, slow growth is baked in the cake and policy errors, whatever they may think about the Trump administration but they know that the market wants to interpret it as a reflationary trade and therefore the trade is reflation until it's not.
That's what these guys are good at, is not sticking to the view but also putting that view aside and saying OK what is the market psychology, should I trade the markets’ view even though it's against my view.
Erik: Next subject we discussed was European exit contagion and I think back then in September you thought that even the U.S. election cycle was really part of something bigger, a growing global populist movement and you thought that that would probably spell a very bad outcome at least in the long term for the European Union.
Of course a lot of your views have been confirmed with the election of President Trump by the time most people hear this he will be president rather than president elect, were speaking on the eve of his inauguration. What do you think now? I mean is the situation better worse or the same from our last conversation in terms of the prognosis for the European Union?
Raoul: Well the prognosis is still the same. It is increasingly difficult for European nations to hold things together because of the financial issue. On a social level people don't want it to change. Europeans have a pretty good quality of life. They have a lot of benefits of being within the European Union in terms of the social contract that they have which is much more pro the average guy than other countries the U.K. and the US hence why the U.K. and the U.S. got the populous movement much larger.
But going forwards it's difficult to know what happens to Europe in this situation. It's not entirely clear that breaking apart from some of the parts of Europe is a good thing other bits such as the currency would be a very good thing and I think over time this populism movement does develop but we need to bear in mind that the market is expecting this.
So tail risk is priced reasonably fairly in Europe. People are all looking for the next shoe to drop. They looked at Italy, they’re looking at France, they’re looking at the German election. All of these things people are looking at and therefore they tend to be less interesting from a market perspective and if we're going to see something different it has to come as a wildcard. Brexit was a wildcard and that shook things out for a while. The Italian election which was an important election, the referendum, actually amounted to nothing in the markets.
